In The Immortal Journeys of Isabelle Eberhardt, eminent literary scholar Hedi A. Jaouad offers a bold reexamination of the Swiss-born writer and adventurer whose short life (18771904) has long been romanticized, misread, or exoticized. Jaouad explores Eberhardt’s spatial existence-dizzyingly mobile, vividly immersive-from a precocious outcast in Geneva to a shape-shifting wanderer in colonial North Africa who lived disguised as an Arab man, converted to Islam, joined a Sufi brotherhood, and fiercely challenged the moral and political boundaries of her time.
