author
M. E. Hume-Griffith
A British traveler and memoirist, this early 20th-century writer is best known for opening a rare window onto women’s lives in Persia and Turkish Arabia. Her work blends close observation, everyday detail, and the perspective of someone who spent years living in the region.
2 Audiobooks
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
Achter den Sluier in Perzië en Turksch Arabië De Aarde en haar Volken, 1917
by M. E. Hume-Griffith
About the author
M. E. Hume-Griffith is best known for Behind the Veil in Persia and Turkish Arabia (1909), a travel memoir based on years spent in Persia and the Turkish province of Mosul. Library of Congress records identify her as Mary Hume-Griffith and describe the book as an account of living and working in the region from 1900 to 1908.
Her husband, Dr. Albert Hume-Griffith, was a British medical missionary, and the book grew out of their shared life abroad. Mary Hume-Griffith focused especially on the lives of women, home life, social customs, and the practical details of everyday experience, giving readers a viewpoint that was unusual for English-language travel writing of the time.
Today, her writing is remembered less as a conventional adventure story than as a vivid firsthand record of a particular place and period. Even when modern readers approach it critically, it remains a valuable glimpse into cross-cultural encounter, domestic life, and women’s worlds in the early 1900s.