GERTRUDE Bell is back in favour. In Iraq. Perhaps her light will shine more brightly in County Durham, her birthplace, and North Yorkshire, where she was raised.

A plaque on Red Barns, a hotel in Coatham, Redcar, reads: "Gertrude Lowthian Bell at one time lived in this house. Scholar, Traveller, Administrator and a Friend of the Arabs." She is also remembered with a memorial window in St Lawrence's Parish Church, East Rounton.

But how many know of the intrepid Miss Bell, whose desert wanderings took her where few Western men, and no Western woman, had been before? How many realise she was a key figure, arguably the key figure, in the creation of modern Iraq? And if that might seem a dubious legacy to posterity, the fact is that after being expunged from Iraq's history by Saddam Hussein, she has been restored to school text books, which introduce her as "an important woman who acted as a go-between between the British Government and the Iraqi people".

To a nation that has been taught it owes its existence to a heroic struggle against imperial power, finally vanquished by Saddam Hussein, this is a sensational reinstatement.

But Gertrude Bell's life overflowed with sensation. The daughter of ironmaster Sir Hugh Bell, a founder of the Teesside company that became Dorman Long, and his wife Mary, she was born at Washington Hall in County Durham. But she grew up at Red Barns and Rounton Grange, East Rounton, new homes built for Sir Hugh and his second wife, Florence, whom he married in 1876.

The demolition in 1954 of Rounton Grange, designed, like Red Barns, by the great Victorian architect Philip Webb, is regarded as one of the major post-war losses of country houses.

At 19, Gertrude became the youngest woman to obtain a first-class honours degree in history at Oxford University. Always adventurous, she took up climbing, conquering the Matterhorn among other peaks. Once, she startled her Alpine guide by removing her skirt to tackle a difficult rock face.

A visit to friends in Jerusalem in 1899 sparked a lifetime's love for the Middle East. Mastering the languages of Persian, Syrian, Arabic and Turkish, she explored the region in numerous journeys.

Once, near Damascus, her small party, all-male apart from herself, was ambushed by sword-swirling Arabs. They robbed the men, and worse might have happened had not two sheiks appeared. Gertrude lightly described the potentially catastrophic incident as "a provoking episode".

In 1913, against the advice of both the British and Ottoman governments, she journeyed to Hayil, now in the northern part of Saudi Arabia. Surviving two attacks on the way, she ended up held for a month in what she called "honourable captivity" (house arrest) in the emir's palace.

Afterwards she wrote: "It was more like the Arabian Nights than ever. The women in their Indian brocades and jewels ... the slaves and eunuchs ... there was nothing but me, myself, which did not belong to medieval Asia."

When her polite requests to leave were refused, she burst into a tent where the men were drinking coffee after prayers. She later recalled: "I spoke my mind without any Oriental paraphrases, and having done so I rose abruptly and left them sitting - a thing which is only done by great sheiks."

Not only did they allow her to leave, but they gave her money for the journey. A strong-minded woman was better out of the country.

When the First World War engulfed the Middle East, Gertrude was running a bureau in Bologne for tracing missing and wounded servicemen. But her knowledge of the Middle East and many contacts there brought a call to take a top position with British Intelligence in the region.

Afterwards, the esteem she enjoyed among the Arabs, who dubbed her "Daughter of the Desert" and "Mother of the Faithful", made her the ideal intermediary, to gather from sheiks, princes and other luminaries their views on reshaping the region.

Officially the advisor to Winston Churchill, Colonial Secretary, at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, Gertrude was in reality rather more. Forged through her own experience and those meetings with Arab leaders, her ideas were crucial in setting the boundaries of what became Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, and especially Iraq, an area she knew with particular intimacy.

"They are the people I love," she wrote. "I know every tribal chief of importance throughout the whole length and breadth of Iraq."

A famous post-war picture shows Gertrude mounted on a camel at the Sphinx, in a party that included Churchill on her right hand and T E Lawrence (of Arabia) on her left. Now elevated - by the British Press - to "Queen of the Desert", she settled permanently in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, she had had two romances. It was probably the death of her first lover, a British attache in Tehran, that moved her to write her only known poem, which includes the lines: "When he found it easy to depart, he left the harder pilgrimage to me." Later came an affair with a married colonel, who was killed at Gallipoli.

Gertrude's awareness even before then that their relationship had no future is mirrored in anguished letters to him: "If you knew how I have paced backwards and forwards along the floor of Hell ... Sometimes I have gone to bed with a heart so heavy that I thought I could not carry it through the next day."

A petite figure, with auburn hair and greenish eyes, Gertrude wasn't the armour-plated Amazon her lifestyle might suggest. One contemporary remarked on her "Paris frocks and Mayfair manners". And despite her own independence, she had little time for the suffragette movement or women's emancipation in general.

But on learning of her death - in Baghdad, two days before her 58th birthday, from an overdose that might been suicide - the House of Commons suspended its proceedings. Gertrude's funeral cortege was followed through Baghdad by as many Arabs as would have turned out for a great sheik. An obituary in The Times described her as "perhaps the most distinguished woman of our day, in the field of oriental exploration, archaeology and literature and in the service of the Empire in Iraq".

Her political achievements have faded or are tarnished. In particular, the Bell-inspired Iraq, embracing the always-distinct Kurds, and awarding superior power to the minority Sunni Muslims over the majority Shias, was fatally flawed.

But the prime aim of her travels had been the pursuit of archaeology. A pioneer photographer, Gertrude left thousands of pictures, many of treasures since gone.

She founded Iraq's National Museum in Baghdad and was appointed the country's honorary director of antiquities. And in 16 journals, now, together with the pictures, forming the "Gertrude Bell Archive" at Newcastle University, she presented vivid accounts of her travels.

"This is a woman - what must the men be like?" is a remark attributed to Arabs who met Gertrude Bell.

According to current reports, the brief new reference to her in Iraq's school text books is to be expanded into a fuller biography. There's plenty to go on