‘Rather a complicated person’: indexing T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)

Hazel K. Bell recounts the extraordinary difficulties and delays she faced in indexing Jeremy Wilson’s Authorised biography of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) while Wilson was still completing it. She goes on to detail her continuing collaboration with Wilson on the ten volumes he published of Lawrence’s correspondence, all issues of the journal of the T. E. Lawrence Society, and the full text of the 1922 edition of Seven pillars of wisdom . In this last index she incorporated terms devised by Lawrence himself as page headings or running titles for the 1926 subscriber edition. Wilson always showed a keen interest in indexing, and planned to upload to the internet a cumulation of all the indexes to his works on Lawrence as a single ‘union index’. It is difficult to establish whether this work was ever completed, or uploaded; little trace remains.