Review: "Desert Governess" by Phyllis Ellis

Desert Governess by Phyllis Ellis
First published 2000
★★★

Following her husband's death, Ellis needed both money and a new direction—and so she took up a post as a governess for some members of the royal family in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royal family is sprawling (10,000–20,000 members, with about 2,000 of those holding the majority of the wealth and power), but she was working for people who were quite high up the chain—a position that brought certain privileges, to be sure, but also one that came with risks. A woman alone in Saudi Arabia, Ellis could not go alone to the grocery or to get her hair cut; she could not leave the palace grounds without permission; she could not leave the country without permission. And although she was never given reason to think that that permission would be unjustly denied, there's something to be said for knowing that you can go your own way if and when you wish. In Saudi Arabia, she couldn't—she was one of a mass of women covered from head to toe, anonymous but under constant scrutiny.

My weirdest experience of this anonymity is in an audience of women in an auditorium for a Health Education meeting. Amira is invited to present diplomas to newly qualified Saudi nurses. Nearly half of the women sit for the entire two and a half hours with their faces covered. The others wear their abayas and head covering.

A Saudi doctor gives a lecture advising women to use their National Health doctor, and not the traditional Bedouin women who prescribe natural cures. Next, slides instruct them on how long to boil goat, camel, sheep, or cow's milk to sterilise it for babies. There has been an outbreak of enteritis in Hail. The projector breaks down several times, and it is bizarre to witness the entire audience throwing their veils over their faces in unison when the male technician appears. (loc. 1279)

In some ways this is a rather outdated book, and there's language in here that wouldn't stand up to a round of 2023 editing (blanket statements about Arab men's sexual appetites, etc.). But for the most part, it's clear that Ellis both liked and respected her employers and was perpetually curious about the world she found herself in, and it's a more interesting book for it. As a woman passing through a land where women's options are limited, she was primed to take note of the different ways women were able to act alone versus in mixed country—and, when she went along with the family to her native England, what changed and didn't change for them there.

One not-quite throwaway thing: at one point Ellis met the first wife of her employer, now divorced. She talks a little bit about how unusual this is—that divorce was taboo, women had no right to decide to divorce, and even for a wealthy and privileged woman it would be difficult to be divorced. Ellis does not speculate about the circumstances surrounding that divorce, but she must have wondered...just as she must have wondered how the younger generation, especially, found the experience of going to places like London and then back to Hail.

Not a standout, but a quick read and an engaging one.