author
M. E. Hume-Griffith
A British travel writer and missionary observer, she chronicled eight years living among women in Persia and Turkish Arabia, offering English-language readers a rare firsthand look into everyday life behind closed doors. Her best-known book blends domestic detail, travel narrative, and sharp cultural observation.
2 Audiobooks
Achter den Sluier in Perzië en Turksch Arabië De Aarde en haar Volken, 1917
by M. E. Hume-Griffith
Behind the Veil in Persia and Turkish Arabia An Account of an Englishwoman's Eight Years' Residence Amongst the Women of the East
by M. E. Hume-Griffith, A. Hume-Griffith
About the author
M. E. Hume-Griffith is best known for Behind the Veil in Persia and Turkish Arabia (1909), a travel and social account drawn from her years in Persia and the Ottoman province of Mosul. Contemporary catalog records and later bibliographic listings identify her as Mary Hume-Griffith, and the book presents her perspective as an Englishwoman living closely among local women while her husband, Dr. Albert Hume-Griffith, worked as a medical missionary.
What makes her writing stand out is its access. She described homes, customs, clothing, health, family life, and conversation in places that many British readers of her time would never have seen, especially the women’s spaces usually closed to male travelers. The result is both a period piece and a vivid eyewitness record of daily life in the early 1900s.
Today, Hume-Griffith is remembered chiefly for that one book, which remains of interest to readers of travel writing, women’s history, missionary history, and Middle Eastern studies. Even when read critically, with awareness of its colonial-era viewpoint, it offers a valuable glimpse of cross-cultural encounter and of the way one woman tried to interpret the world she lived in.