The restless Geneva-born Isabelle Eberhardt began writing about French North Africa in her teens, despite never having visited the region, and she soon moved to Algeria. She travelled in native garments and presented as a man, the intention and effect of which was to allow her to move freely on her own, and also joined a Sufi sect and married an Arab Algerian. She died young (in 1904, at the age of twenty-seven) in her adoptive homeland, leaving behind a cache of fiction, letters, and above all travel diaries, which readers have celebrated both for Eberhardt’s anti-colonialism and for the boldness of her adventuring spirit. The novelist Abdellah Taïa, who fell in love with Eberhardt’s writing as a teenager in Morocco, remembers that "[she] wrote in French but her words didn't sound French to me. These words brimmed with another worldview—Arab, Berber, Muslim—before which the writer showed not the least sign of arrogance."