愛情的險岸

by 萊斯蕾．布蘭琪(Lesley Blanch), 萊斯蕾·布蘭琪, 廖婉如 (Translator)

不論在東方或西方，她們都獨一無二

她們是愛情的現實主義者，敢於掙脫時代的枷鎖，做一個獨特的自己。
她們跟隨東方之星的召喚，不管那星辰將她們帶往何處……

「愛情啊愛情，總是在同一本書裡讀到，但不見得在同一頁。」

她們每一個都屬於西方，屬於十九世紀的歐洲，
但，她們都以自己的方式，用愛情作為實現自我的工具；
在東方發現了光輝的地平線，在情感和膽量上找到新視野。

Genres: History, Biography, Nonfiction, Travel, Middle East, Memoir, Womens

400 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1954

Reviews

[Lynne King · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I opened this book and began reading, the book didn’t just smile at me but positively glowed. What a stunning book about four women from the nineteenth century who were excited by the East and of finding love and adventure, and set out to achieve their ideals.

Isabel Arundell (later Burton): A determined woman, had a desire to go to the East, and as soon as she met Richard Burton, “with his dark Arabic face, his ‘questing panther eyes’, he was for her that lodestar East, the embodiment of all her longings. Man and land were identified.”

She had once been told by a gypsy called Hagar Burton that she would meet a man with the same surname. So destiny began working. However, It took ten years for Isabel to marry Burton as her parents were against him but in the end it all worked and she lived a wonderful but very demanding life.

Jane Digby (later El Mezrab): A truly powerful Victorian English woman. She was an Amazon. She went through a life of whirlwind marriages: Successively she was Lady Ellenborough, Baroness Venningen, Countess Theotoky and then finally the wife of Sheikh Abdul Medjuel El Mezrab. A very successful marriage that lasted thirty years. They spent half of the the year in a house in Homs, Syria and the other half in the desert in the Bedouin tents. Jane loved the desert lifestyle and actually retained her beauty into her late sixties. One of these passionate women, she literally lived for the day and the excitement and did indeed find this with her Arab Sheikh.

Aimée Dubucq de Rivery: A very innocent young girl returning from a convent school in Nantes to her home in Martinique, was captured by corsairs and ended up in Constantinople as a gift to the Caliph of the Faithful, Padishar of the Barbary States, Shadow of the Prophet upon Earth, the Sultan Abul l Hamid I – Aimée’s fate.

She was obviously a strong character as she made a very good marriage in the end, all within the confines of the seraglio. But what fascinated me was the hierarchy in the luxury of the harem. The four favourite wives, and more so if they had a son, lived splendid rich lives with access outside their gilded cages.

Isabelle Eberhard. She was from a Russian background but had grown up in Geneva. When her mother, the wife of a Russian general, decided to move to Bône in Algeria, Isabelle threw herself into her Arabic, which soon became fluent and she very quickly appeared to be more of an Arab than the Arabs themselves. With the unfortunate death of her mother, she spent most of her life in the desert and travelled everywhere, writing articles and getting some published in the Algerian newspapers.

What is so amazing about these four women was their determination to achieve their dreams. For Jane Digby, Isabelle Eberhardt and Isabel Burton, their desires came to fruition. Aimée Dubucq achieved very high status in the Ottoman Empire.

[Daren · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one took me a while to get through, mostly because I didn't take it away on a recent trip, but also it wasn't the most engaging read for me.
Other five star reviews, which motivated me to seek this book out, raved about it (despite its odd title which makes it sound like some sort of work of romance), but despite enjoying it enough to persist, it wasn't a winner for me.

This book charts the biographies of four women who 'belonged to the West but dared to turn to the East for adventure and love.' Each biography gets progressively shorter - such that Isabel Burton's (Isabel Arundell) is just under half the book, and sabelle Eberhardt's is 37 pages.

Isabel Burton's story, as one might expect is more Richard Burton's story, and his wife as his biggest fan is pretty much the theme of her life. She publicised his early exploration, writing and translating, then followed him around the world in his diplomatic roles, where she was often left to pack, ship and follow. 1831-1896

Jane Digby's story is her succession of husbands, before she married Sheikh Abdul Medjuel El Mezrab is Syria. He was twenty years her junior, but she remained married to him for thirty years. She lived part of the year in Bedouin tents, the other in the city of Homs. 1807 - 1881.

Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, her story foretold by a fortune teller, was the daughter of wealthy French plantation owner in Martinique, was abducted by Barbary pirates, and handed over to the Ottoman sultan, where she rose to become Sultana and mother to the heir of the throne. 1768-1817.

And finally Isabelle Eberhardt, from a Russian background, but educated in Switzerland, she travelled to Algeria, which became her spiritual home. She had published stories under a male pseudonym, and also dressed as a man to allow her to travel in the desert. She was fluent in Arabic, dabbled in Sufi mysticism, and converted to Islam. She was drowned in a flash flood in Algeria, at age 27. 1877-1904.

To end, a quote from which the book earned its title, referring to Jane Rigby: P136

“Her whole life was spent riding at breakneck speed along the wilder shores of love."

3 stars

[Shovelmonkey1 · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a whole lot of Burton-love flying about on Goodreads and it has prompted me to write this review. Should you chance across this book while perusing a thrift store or second hand book shop, your hand may graze across the spine and you would be forgiven for immediately thinking that this is some kind of saucy laydee romance novel. If you bought it thinking it was a saucy laydee novel then you will be sorely disappointed.

This book is actually a very engaging account of four women who threw off their corsets, shouted "to hell with convention" and decided to go and get some action in the Middle East. The four women in question are Isabel Burton who pursued and married Richard Francis Burton with what can only be described as frightening determination, Jane Digby el-Mezrab ( a proper English lady in both senses of the word), Aimee Du Becq de Rivery (cousin of Josephine Bonaparte) and Isabelle Eberhardt (the cross-dressing linguist). All four women came from educated, upper class families but sought an escape in the desert, and normally in the arms of men who society would have deemed utterly inappropriate at the time.

Burton was a man "gone native" who disappeared for years on end into the empty quarter, Mecca and various parts of Africa and India only to re-emerge clutching fistfuls of what the Victorian public would swiftly label as pornographic literature. Isabel allegedly married him in the hope that she would be able to accompany him on some of his more outlandish excursions, instead she ended up as his copy editor, sitting behind a desk at home while hubby plunged off into another uncharted swamp or desert. El-Mezrab was a tribal leader who waged war, made love and engaged in local politiking from the comfort of his Bedouin tent with Lady Ellenborough (Digby) as consort. Aimee Du Becq de Rivery was captured by Barbary Corsairs, sold to the Sultan of Istanbul as a concubine and fought her way up the Seraglio ranks to become Sultana, mother of the heir to the Ottoman throne and one of the most under-rated but influential women in European politics at the time. Eberhardt met an untimely end in a flash flood in Algeria but not before she had married Slimane Ehnni, dabled in Sufi Mysticism and adopted Islam as her religion.

Four amazing women, some of whom have historically fallen into the shadow of their menfolk, but who should be regarded as rule breakers and trend setters. They pursued their lust for adventure to the edges of the horizon and the desert and found happiness, albeit it briefly in some cases, by living a life less ordinary.

[S'hi · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting exploration of the lives of four women with deep and abiding connections with the Levant despite their English or European origins. Arranged in a kind of reverse order, the first to be presented, along with her very-much-chosen husband, is Isabel Arundell who married Richard Burton. After the twin portrayal of their lives, which in some way is like a middle-eastern version of Eleanor and Theodore Roosevelt, each of the other’s goes back a little earlier in time but overlaps the already presented life.
So secondly we learn a little more about Jane Digby El Mezrab, who was reasonably well-known to the Burton’s having married her last husband in Syria before the couple arrived together in Damascus. This life is a series of closely-linked monogamous relationships, some involving marriage, and children, but not necessarily all having either characteristic. This was a highly intelligent and educated woman who challenged herself beyond any perceived restrictions, and earned great respect among the people she eventually resided with in the desert.

The third study goes inside the seraglio where Aimee Dubucq De Rivery, cousin of Josephine of Napoleonic fame, was spirited when her ship was taken over. She learned much of politics from the inside machinations among the women and their respective sons in line for the rule as Sultan, and seems to have had quite an influence on middle-eastern foreign affairs through her connections before her son became a reformer during his reign.

Finally the very brief but intense life of Isabelle Eberhardt, born in Switzerland but with multiple languages and streams of cultural influence throughout Europe, despite her desperate desire to be in the desert. Living one of those lives that seems to race itself to its own finishing line, as if all along knowing it did not have the time others would have to fully form and express itself, it all came in a rush and proved its own demise by its awareness of living on that most challenging of lines, always conscious of death.

The shape of this book, in effect, laps the stories over each other like waves of influence that ebb and flow. Most fitting then to end with young Isabelle’s death by drowning in the desert she so loved. I am not sure how much of her work has been translated into English, as most of what was published during and after her lifetime was in French, but I am most curious to read her directly if I can. If it means polishing up on my French to do so effectively I will. But hopefully I can find more in English to prepare the way, as her interests in mysticism most closely sit with my own explorations throughout my own life, making her tale more poignant to me than the earlier lives.
A fascinating read, and also interesting to consider the timing of Lesley Blanch’s writing in the 50s. As I look through my own tourist photos of sitting on a camel above the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem in the early 1980s, and consider how uncomfortable I still felt on my first overseas adventure into a slightly less challenging cultural setting, I find I am perhaps a little too dismissive of these women’s journeys as they have not set off any great stream of followers to challenge the world the way they each did.

But none of them particularly took a stance for anyone’s else’s life but their own. At that time that task was itself enough. But each had already some resource and backing through education and family station to undertake the journey they did, despite it also being so unconventional within their own time. These are not comparable stories “of women” over time, so much as simply very interesting lives which gave possibility to others should they look outside themselves for inspiration and courage. In some ways each of these women did have a great sense within themselves of themselves and their own destinies, and went out into the world to meet that.

I am not sure that many women necessarily feel that intensity of commitment now. It is more a rare aspect of individuals than a gender issue as such, although the gender aspects no doubt play a significant role in how they met their own challenges. Where a woman’s angle may differ from a man’s appears most likely through another rather than acting directly from and for herself. But here the story of the Burton’s is particularly interesting as it shows how this happens as much for the woman as the man, though in a kind of opposite reflection. It is of the nature of close partnerships for greater things to come into the world, than merely a marriage which is only one possibility for such a manifestation.

There are many layers within these stories of how the outsider provides a kind of leverage for those within a culture to test out differences and changes for themselves through the permission they give themselves to allow visitors in their midst. There are always dangers – of stagnating as much as rapid change – and the balancing effects within individuals and within their social milieu are displayed with great relevance for today as far less educated people are beginning to mix and mingle all across the world, in ways that challenge all of our traditions and desires for change.

[Elizabeth · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoy stories about strong, independent and adventurous women! This story details the lives of four extrodinary characters 'who have followed the beckoning Eastern star' and broken away from nineteenth century Europe to very different lives in the middle east.

The stories capture extreme variations in terms of the womans personailties, their backgrounds and their origins; but each shares a commonality - using love to express, liberate and fulfil their lives.

Personally I think the subject matter is emotionally charged and offers so much juicy material for a great novel. Just a shame that Lesley Blanch didn't explore these themes and kept the tone very formal.

[George · Rating 2 out of 5]

MOSTLY BORING.

“Her whole life was spent riding at breakneck speed along the wilder shores of love.”—page 136

There are, undoubtedly, books more boring to read than this one; but my hope is that neither of us will ever have to read any of them.

Admittedly, Arabian nights and Turkish delights have never held much excitement for my fancy, so the setting of Lesley Blanch’s four-woman, biographical vignettes, THE WILDER SHORES OF LOVE, combined with her stilted, formal, presentation, may have been a part of the reasons I found it rather uninteresting.

Let me borrow from goodreader, Elizabeth’s October, 2012 review of this book in which she wrote, “I really enjoy stories about strong, independent and adventurous women!” So do I.

The four women whose stories are told in ‘Wilder Shores…,’ however, are far more unusual than remarkable—and quite seriously uninteresting. I’ll possibly except Aimee Dubucq De Rivery—kidnapped by pirates at twenty-one and given, as a gift, into a Turkish harem, there to rise to Sultana—in this instance. She, who was a cousin to Joséphine Bonaparate, was the only one of these four women I might like to read more about.

Recommendation: Unless you’re a total Lawrence of Arabia / French Foreign Legion fan, you might want to pass on this one.

“…her vapidity was as remarked as her beauty.”—page 151

Quality Paperback Book Club edition, on loan from the Los Angeles County Public Library, 332 pages

[Marissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Believe it or not, I decided to read The Wilder Shores of Love because it got quoted in the J. Peterman catalogue next to an illustration of a fancy nightgown. And after reading the book, that doesn’t seem like a bad place for it. Like the J. Peterman catalogue, it is fanciful, romantic, ardent, and full of exoticism. It is seductive yet also a guilty pleasure, due to the way it traffics in outdated stereotypes about ethnicity and gender.

Lesley Blanch takes for her subjects four well-bred European women who discovered that their “destiny” lay in the Middle East. First is Isabel Burton, a devout Catholic girl who fell madly in love with Richard Burton, the dashing explorer and Orientalist. Posterity has reviled Isabel because she burned Richard’s notes and manuscripts after he died, but Blanch shows that she was more than just a prudish Victorian wife.

Next we learn about Jane Digby, a beautiful aristocrat who had a string of scandalous romances that took her from England to France to Germany to Greece, and who finally found stability and contentment as the wife of a Bedouin tribesman.

Then comes Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, a French girl who was shipwrecked, kidnapped by pirates, sold into the Ottoman Emperor’s harem, and eventually saw her son become Sultan. It was fun to read about the intrigues and treacheries of the Ottoman court, like a real-life version of Game of Thrones. But alas, this section of the book seems to be pure speculation. There is no conclusive proof that Aimée Dubucq became an Ottoman concubine, yet Blanch keeps discussing what Aimée “must have felt” or “might have done.”

The book finishes with the brief, febrile life of Isabelle Eberhardt, a Russian-Swiss woman who roamed around Algeria dressed as a man, taking many lovers and trying to become a Sufi mystic. Even though all of the women in this book led unconventional, adventurous lives, Eberhardt is the strangest and most complex, and I’m not sure that Lesley Blanch fully understands her. Burton, Digby, and Dubucq get slotted as the Passionate Wife, Sexual Amazon, and Sly Sultana, respectively; Eberhardt doesn’t fit into a box like that.

Blanch tries to explain Eberhardt by frequent references to her “melancholy Russian soul,” but to a 21st-century reader, that just sounds silly and stereotypical. So, too, do Blanch’s invocations of “Oriental cunning” or “Arab fatalism.” This book tells of four women whose love for the Middle East included large doses of romantic exoticism; but in reporting their stories, Blanch often falls into the traps of exoticism herself.

[David Gee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lesley Blanch, who died at the age of 103 in 2007, must be the very last of the great Bohemians. She wrote about fashion and interior design for Vogue and published books celebrating her passion for Russia and the Balkans. This new compilation has been put together by her god-daughter and includes some of Blanch’s travel writing, a retrospective memoir of her Edwardian childhood and (previously published only in French) the story of her marriage to the Russian-French soldier-diplomat and writer Romain Gary.

Her god-daughter calls her “a Sheherezade figure”. Blanch romanticises in vivid detail her girlhood in the years leading up to World War One. She had a baby by an Italian soldier, gave it up for adoption and never mentions it again. I couldn’t decide whether she was heartbroken or heartless. Her first teenage impression of Florence was that it was “forbidding”; Venice was “draughty”.

Blanch’s style, very much trapped in the era between the wars, is often as indigestibly rich as Lawrence Durrell and occasionally as suffocatingly gushing as Barabara Cartland. I was also reminded of Gore Vidal. Like Gore, Lesley must have been a fabulous guest at a dinner party: a colourful talker but not perhaps a great listener. Her writing suggests a monstrous ego at work (Vidal again!). She had a prodigious memory but what she recalls in the most vivid detail are people’s homes and “collectables”. The portrait of her marriage is disappointing: she refers to Gary’s “amorous conquests” (he was a serial adulterer) without going into details and draws a veil over her own infidelities.

I was gifted this book and would not have read it otherwise. Lesley Blanch “lived a life of high intensity on many a wilder shore” (her god-daughter’s words). There is a lot to like, even to admire, in this recollection of a peripatetic life that spanned the entire twentieth century, but its author, I suspect, was not a likeable woman.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four biographies of European women whose lives were entangled with Arab countries. Published in 1954, the book is both a milestone of women's biography and a participant in the West's romanticization of "the Orient" that was already becoming outpaced by reality. I found the portraits of these little-known women fascinating, and particularly loved the suggestion that Napoleon's defeat in Russia was brought about by a Frenchwoman in a harem who was furious with him for divorcing her cousin, Josephine.

[Sami · Rating 4 out of 5]

Facsinating biographies of remarkable women in the Arab world. Loved the old fashioned English style peppered with French; except last biography due to a very abrupt change in writing. It is hard to believe that it was written by the same author.

[Eileen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is important to note that the book was written in 1954. This is the story of four women of the 19th century who found love and adventure in the Middle East. Given the amount of moal codes at the time, the woman portrayed are extraordinary. Some of it is verifiable history, some legend, and some pure fantasy.

The first woman is Isabel Arundell Burton, 1831-1896, wife of the most famous explorer of the age, Sir Richard Francis Burton. In fact, this portion makes up a third of the book, given the amount of time spent describing Sir Richard’s exploits. He was also the greatest ethnographer of the age, and wrote book after book about it, including a traslation of the Kama Sutra. Isabel was single-minded. Once she clapped eyes on Burton, she was determined to marry him. She wore both Burton and her parents down, and after 10 years of waiting, they married. The only way I can describe the marriage is that she consumed him. It's really hard to explain how a man who bucked every Victorian convention let her just take him over, body and soul. But there it is.

The Burtons continued to travel extensively, Isabel in charge of packing and unpacking, in their quest for employment and adventure. For both, it was the Middle East, which fascinated them and their time Damascus. They met and became friends with Jane Digby, the second woman profiled. Unfortunately, Sir Richard’s penchant for telling the absolute truth to power got him fired over and over. In the end, he was a broken man, still in the thrall of Isabel. When he died, Isabel did a thing for which I can never forgive her. She spent days burning his journals. Then, suffering from cancer, she had enough years to construct a marble Arabian tent as his tomb, where both now rest.

Jane Digby El Mezrab 1807-1881 is my favorite of the four women portrayed. She loved the adventure of loving and spent the greater part of her life moving, living, and marrying men from kings to generals.. She married four times, the last to Arab Sheik Abdul Medjuel El Mezrab, about 20 years her junior. He was her greatest love, and he adored her, even ending his first marriage for her. Their marriage lasted for 28 years. This is just the bare bones of her tale. I have four pages of notes, but I'm going to let you read about her for yourself. There is a full biography of Jane that I'll be reading next.

The next woman is Aimée Dubucq de Rivery. It is my least favorite tale, mainly because it is pure fantasy and a long one at that. Historians debunked the story many years ago. The bare bones are this, she was born in Martinique, was the cousin of Josephine Bonapart, was sent on a ship to France for an education. The ship was taken by Algerian Cordairs, and she was never heard from again. The fantasy is that she was sold to the Sultan Avb ül Hamid II in Constantinople, put in his harem, and by whom she had a son and heir to the throne.

The last and most unsavory woman is Isabelle Eberhardt 1877-1904. Yes, she was only 27 when she died, but she packed a lifetime of debauchery, venereal disease, alcoholism, and drug use into those years. She was Swiss by birth, but her paternity wasn't clear. Let us just say she claimed multiple ethnicities and mostly dressed as a man, though clearly heterosexual. She was deeply in love with her brother and tried to commit suicide several times after he died. She converted to Islam in 1897, though we are not sure she formally converted, and then broke every rule of that religion. She dressed like a man and called herself Si Mahmoud Saadi. Amazingly, the Arabs of Algeria, where she settled, tolerated her. The French authorities thought her a spy and tried to kill her. She died as unconventionally as she lived.

This was a fascinating book, and I've picked up a couple of biographies to delve deeper into two of the profiles.

[Dr Susan Turner · Rating 5 out of 5]

An early introduction to one of my 'heroes' Richard Burton and the women who followed him both literally and figuratively. Agreat read.

[Vel Veeter]

This book is several decades old now, so it has some real baggage to it. There's the racial and cultural baggage of being an orientialist book about orientalists orientaliziing the orient. For one. Also, especially in the first section, there's a heavy emphasis in old school notions of love and marriage and well plenty of it feels from a certain time and place. The book itself though is an incredibly interesting personal history of four otherwise not well known women who tore off for the near East for a differing set of reasons.

In part one, we meet Isabel Burton who in her youth read all about the exploits and adventures of Richard Burton, the incredibly famous warrior for hire, adventurer, linguist, archaeologist, and translator. So she decided to marry him. Their marriage together involved a kind dynamic we see a lot now with celeb married to a normie, with a heavy dose of codependency and compromise. They also spent incredibly long periods of time apart from one another too.

In part two, we meet Jane Digby, contemporary of the Burtons who kept restarting her life at various times and moving more and more toward the Near East in idea and proximity.

The last two sections blended more for me, and I was ready to be done. I still enjoyed the book, but there's only so much of similar stories and unchecked....well, problematic ideas that you can take before you need a break. It's an interesting book, but the stories both blend together a little and also don't really hold up over time, in the manner they're written about here.

[bookblast official · Rating 5 out of 5]

These four very different, very individual, women who chose to flee the industrialised conventional West for Eastern climes is as vivid and seductive as when I first read it twenty years ago. Isabel Burton: obsessed by her wild explorer husband Richard Burton who brought the Kama Sutra to the English, and was the first European to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the source of the Nile. Aimee Dubucq Rivery the cousin of Napoleon's wife Josephine who was kidnapped by pirates and ended up in the Sultan's harem; the mother of Mahmud II. Isabelle Eberhardt who wrote on her travels across the Sahara and was loved by the locals,liked to dress as a man, became addicted to hashish and died in a flash-flood in the desert at the age of 27. And the one with whom Lesley Blanch felt the greatest affinity, Jane Digby: 'She had a superb home in Damascus, was uninhibited, rode through life jumping all the fences, social and moral.' Unputdownable.

[Stephen Brody · Rating 4 out of 5]

In her introduction Lesley Blanch writes: “The four women who form the subject of this book might be described as northern shadows flitting across a southern landscape. All of them belonged to the West, to the fast-greying climate of nineteenth-century Europe where the twentieth-century disintegration of women, as such, was already foreshadowed. Yet of widely different natures, backgrounds and origins, all had this in common – each found, in the East, glowing horizons of emotion and daring, which were, for them, now vanishing from the West. And each of them, in her own way, used love as a means of individual expression, of liberation and fulfilment within that radiant periphery.”

We can agree about the “twentieth century disintegration”, that’s probably true enough. After about 1750, for some complicated reason, women’s choices as to how to live as individual humans in their own right became increasingly limited, so that by the later nineteenth they were down to about two – ministering angels or whores, for the most part an unbridgeable division. Twentieth century ‘feminism’ was mostly about breaking these stereotypes, never entirely successful and since arguably even less so. But in a way the geographical factor is incidental, unless it represents warmth and the need for less, or less restrictive, clothing, in itself suggestive to the Northern imagination of sensuality and ‘freedom’ though in fact as many or more social restrictions operate in the East as in the West and the Eastern countries have now become a target, accurately or otherwise, for those Western women worried about the ‘oppression’ of their oriental sisters. And as to the last sentence, that’s largely incomprehensible to the average man, for whom “love” is just another adventure amongst many other possibilities. To the male characters in this book it meant nothing much at all. Of course they loved the women they were involved with, but in a different way; it was not the be-all-end-all of their existences, it was not “a means of individual expression, liberation and fulfilment. That came from other wider and more diverse sources, and here we meet the eternal predicament known as the battle of the sexes, most strikingly represented in the first and longest in this collection of biographical essays.

For Isabel Arundell The East was embodied in the person of the most famous and daring ‘Orientalist’ of the time within her compass, Richard Burton, whose reputation was as disreputable as it was enviable. The two of them happened to cross each other’s paths in Boulogne where although no couple would seem to be less likely, Miss Arundell decided on the spot, having as she imagined been transfixed by the explorer’s piercing gaze, that this was the only man she would ever marry. Astonishingly she did, though it took quite a while and a lot of determination. She was considered, when younger, quite an eligible match, “Juno-esque” of stature and “moon-faced” not withstanding; he was described as “by turns a black leopard caged but unforgiving, and again Balzac’s ex-gallerian Vautrin hiding his grim identity under an Abbé’s cassock." Her first experience of anything ‘exotic’ was in an unsavoury Brazilian backwater, where her new husband had been sent in some minor official post for lack of anything better by the Colonial Office, which however much it disapproved was not anxious to lose his undoubted expertise. She was sadly disillusioned but undeterred. She was entirely at home however soon after when Burton was appointed Consul to Damascus – rather too much at home, because what with his seemingly rather casual attitude towards his official duties and her highly painted florid complexion (under the delusion that she looked ‘Arabic’), grand airs and – as some said – overbearing and interfering nature, the appointment was cut short sooner than it should have been and the Burtons found themselves “impoverished”. By her ceaseless importuning on his behalf, they next found themselves in Trieste, slightly East but nowhere near far enough, where impoverished or not they lived in grand style. But by then Burton, in his fifties, was worn out and in bad health from his highly adventurous career and accepted with oriental fatalism that nothing awaited except dull provincialism. Not Isabel, by now a stout and rather preposterous figure, she kept up a gruellingly energetic social round, the managing of all the affairs her husband considered beneath him, like a lady of the manor dispensing charity to the worthy and organising frequent trips to anywhere even a whiff of the Mystic East might be wafted in the wind. She was indefatigable. In spite of living in now-unimaginable luxury, Burton decided he had to find some way of making money, and hit on an unexpected winner. He proposed to publish a translation in English (actually from the French) of Alf Laylah iwa Laylah, One Thousand Nights and a Night, in three versions: one for children, one for ‘adults’ and a deluxe edition for ‘connoisseurs’. What might be described as a bawdy work at the best, with the addition of Burton’s extensive notes of esoteric oriental habits and customs of which he knew more than anyone, the deluxe version was a shocker, and aided by a good deal of pious tut-tutting sold out with celerity. Burton insisted, rightly, that he was no pornographer but a serious scholar who happened to be recording things that were not spoken of, or even remotely imagined, in the West, noting with cynical amusement: “I have struggled for forty-seven years, distinguished myself honourably in every way that I could. I never had a compliment, not even a ‘thank you’ nor a single farthing. I translate a doubtful book in my old age and immediately make sixteen thousand guineas. Now that I know the tastes of the English, we need never be without money.”

Poor Isabel, cast as proof-reader, business intermediary and general dogsbody, with an inherited rather prudish Catholicism now flourishing, was unable to take such a light view of things, but she buckled down because, well, the money was useful and anything that enhanced Richard’s recognition was worth the sacrifice. She drew the line though at the next enterprise, when Burton set out to repeat his success with the notorious Arab manuscript The Scented Garden Men’s Hearts to Gladden, as much he said to bait the Grundys as for any literary value. He died, quite peacefully before it was finished, leaving behind a vast quantity of notes, memoirs, a treasure-store of unique knowledge. Isabel knew she already had cancer, information she never revealed, and she had two final tasks. She didn’t hesitate. If Richard Burton could never be hers entirely he wasn’t going to be anyone else’s and certainly not those houris’ in the Muslim Paradise. She insisted he was a secret Catholic at heart, she’d had a personal vision from God, and arranged a state funeral from the Trieste authorities, never before granted even to kings. Then one by one she consigned every page he’d ever written to the fire, took the coffin back to England where she soon joined him in an outlandish mausaleum in the form of a cement tent, his soul rescued, securely hers for ever.

Burton’s sister was especially indignant over what she saw as misappropriation by a scheming Papist, though she may not have been too sorry about the destruction of the papers. Others were. Isabel Burton was likened to John Ruskin, who decided it was his Christian duty to burn Turner’s ‘indecent’ watercolour sketches. The key to Burton’s mysterious character, and why he ever married in the first place, information which he was always at pains to obfuscate, anyway would now never be found. One thing is fairly clear: it was not a marriage in the fleshly sense. There’s no indication that Burton ever looked at anyone else, or at least no woman, but he probably found it useful to have a secretary, a nursemaid, a manager, a companion hardy or stoical enough to countenance his recklessness without complaint, and Isabel was a born nurse, even after having being turned down as a girl by Florence Nightingale as not up to it.

There’s nothing whatever of the nurse in the next character, who gave herself over willingly and voluptuously to a desert pasha and took up residence in a real Arab tent where she still was at the age of seventy. Lady Jane Digby’s family was grander than the Arundells and more accustomed to eccentricity, but even so she had exceeded the limits before she was twenty even amongst the rakes of Regency London just before Victorian morality cast the suffocating pall of hypocritical respectability that pretended to ignore the Burtons; indeed both ladies met in Damascus where Mrs Burton was obsequiously disapproving though impressed by the string of titles the other had collected in the course of her career – Lady Ellenborough, mistress of Prince Schwarzenberg and the talk of all Paris, Baroness von Venningen , Countess Spyridon Theotoky and nearly Queen of both Bavaria and Greece. Jane Digby went through husbands or lovers alike like a scythe, leaving a string of children in her wake which she abandoned immediately to their fathers’ possibly more attentive care while she galloped on. Amongst other lesser fry she’d had a brief liaison with Honoré de Balzac who described her as “African, a peculiar adjective unless referring to a quality of tawny unruly passion in an elegantly-blonde English aristocrat.” Perhaps it was just the air of innocent impetuous naivety that ravaged and then ploughed over so many hearts. Then, after a fling with an Albanian bandit, she suddenly bolted off from Athens to Syria in search of a thoroughbred Arab horse. The Lady did not travel light: damask, silver, bed linen, kitchen equipment and a vast wardrobe followed her everywhere as well as a changing menagerie. The dozens of crates and boxes and the retinue naturally attracted the keen scrutiny of those of the Syrians who were accustomed to move about with little more than they stood in. Before a month was up, already forty-six, she’d eloped with a “lusty young Arab”. Another desert sheik produced a splendid horse but it was considered unbreakable. Taming it herself the sheik, much impressed, declared the animal beyond price, in money that is; the price was herself. Here for once she haggled – only on the condition that he get rid of his harem. At that he demurred, but nonetheless gallantly offered his protection as an escort on an expedition to Palmyra, then a highly dangerous destination as blood feuds were rife between the desert tribes and to any of them a carelessly rich madwoman, as they considered her, was competitive fair game. Naturally they were attacked, and the brave sheik warded off the attackers. Some said he’d arranged it all himself, but now Jane, still hopelessly naïve, was impressed; what woman could not be by a duel fought over her, and she began to view Sheik Medjuel El Mezrab with new eyes. “He was not at all the novelette version of the blazing-eyed desert Adonis” and younger but not too much younger, as Mme Blanch admits, but incurably romantic herself insists on his noble, scholarly and truly religious nature and his freedom from all mercenary instincts, as did indeed did all who knew him. The story, by now, partly gleaned from accounts by a notorious French gossip columnist of the time, was approaching that of high operatic melodrama, Lady Ellenborough as she called herself when it was useful had excelled herself this time. Returning to Athens to “settle her affairs” there – disposing of her previous attachments in other words - and finding it already a-buzz with scandalous rumours, she was back – to the horror of the British Consul - in Damascus within a year to learn, most gratifyingly, that the sheik had sent a former wife packing, and to cut a long story of violent passions, mutual misunderstandings and savage quarrels short, she married him; one of them had to give in and the lady was gracious. She remained so for the next nearly thirty years.

It was not perhaps that this rider on the wildest shores had any particular Oriental ambitions as that she treated everywhere with what might be called oriental insouciance or fatalism and inevitably ended up where she could go no further. The third of our heroines was enraptured by the East literally. At the age of twenty one, Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, cousin to the future Joséphine Bonaparte, was on a boat returning her from a French convent school to her home in Martinique. The vessel, driven off course by a storm, took refuge in a Mediterranean harbour where it was attacked by Barbary pirates and she was seized and taken to the Dey of Algiers who, to curry favour with his master the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, forwarded her as a pearl beyond compare to Istanbul. Faced with “an enormous figure waddling towards her, his ermine-lined pelisse sweeping behind him, his towering turban nodding with flamingo plumes ….. beside him a pyramid of heads, some so newly severed that they reeked and streamed with blood”, the poor girl fainted dead away. The nuns had not prepared her for that sort of thing!

About the Harem, the innermost women’s quarters of the Seraglio, Mme Blanch can say little since few if any Westerners ever entered one. Apparently, though, contrary to the image in torrid imaginations, strict discipline and formality prevailed, almost like a nunnery, because it was the women who actually held the power behind the throne, vied for their lord’s notice with fierce rivalry between them to place an heir on the throne. With native shrewdness Mlle de Rivery (now known as Naksh, The Beautiful One), learned fast, cultivating those she judged to be influential. Sultan Abd ul Hamid’s nephew Selim, a rather delicate young man with ‘progressive’ ideas, was his recognised heir; his First Wife, not progressive at all and relying on the support of the terrifying Janisseries, had every intention of advancing her own son at any price, and two ferocious factions had developed within the palace. The Beautiful One, having been expertly trained in the “arts of love”, and to the other’s fury, rapidly usurped her and had a son of her own who was the apple of his father’s eye. Half French and carefully and continuously watched over and guarded by his mother and with an education that was only half Turkish, the boy – having murdered his rival - survived to adulthood to become until 1839 Sultan Mahmud II of Turkey.

That the French odalisque was “the inspiration and guiding force behind various political intrigues stretching far beyond the Seraglio’s walls or even the Turkish frontiers” is, as the writer freely concords, conjecture. Nonetheless, a letter from Selim to Louis XVI, contemptuously ignored at Versailles, could only have had one author and Mahmud once established as the Shadow of Allah on Earth was, still is, known as The Reformer, even if all the barbarous colour of the Ottoman Empire disappeared for ever. That she ‘loved’ the father of her child, a rigidly conservative and sometimes brutal old man whom she could rarely have seen, is extremely unlikely though perhaps in a way he did her. Perhaps she was grateful, which will do well enough; as the Sultan’s mother she wielded almost complete power from within, demonstrating a Creole ruthlessness of her own. In her magnificent suite, knowing nothing until Napoleon’s intervention in Turkish affairs of the Revolution or her cousin’s rise to Empress, she recreated the salons of the French eighteenth century and by example and influence dragged Turkey into a sort of Westernisation for better or for worse.

Finally, perhaps the strangest or least decipherable player in this tableau, exploring a most unusual form of love. “A woman dressed as a man, an expatriate wanderer whose untidy mystical torments found peace in Islam’s faith, whose nomadic Slav background led her to range the desert insatiably yet she dreamed of a petit-bourgeois haven. She adored her insignificant husband but her sensual adventures were without number. Her behaviour was outrageous; she drank, she smoked hashish, but déclassé she remained racée… La Bonne Nomade, L’Amazone du Sable, L’Androgyne du Desert – (epithets not always intended admiringly) - was a legend in her lifetime.” Its source died in 1904 at twenty-seven, almost farcically, in a flash flood in a desert.

Of Russian descent, at the age of eighteen and already fluent enough in Arabic thanks to an erratic though useful education, Isabelle Eberhardt simply bought a horse and headed off from Geneva to the Sahara where she remained for most of her short life. Neurotic and unstable, it would be easy to say in simplistic modern language, but that won't do here. To quote the author: “One wonders what is it was, precisely, that made Si Mahmood (as she called herself) such a tormented soul, and one falls back on l’ame slave, which obligingly covers such a multitude of obscure neurasthenics”. Meandering, apparently aimlessly and purposelessly, all over the interior of Algeria and Tunisia, usually alone and usually dressed and acting insofar as she could like a man, she earned the respect of the Arabs who were aware of the travesty but not bothered by it as well as the admiration of the more sophisticated of the French administration for her knowledge of the territories in their charge. But too erratic, whimsical and lazy to be efficient at anything almost the only accurate details had to be gleaned from the few scattered individuals who either dimly remembered her or were still aware of the legend when Blanch managed to seek them out. Some journal entries, absinthe-driven reveries, not written with very polished literary style, regrettably partly ‘edited’ and sensationalised after her death and more poetic than informative, remain, in themselves strangely beautiful without providing many biographical clues: “… the long hours with neither sadness or boredom – nothingness – where one is nourished by silence … I have never regretted one of these lost hours … I felt myself immortal, and so rich in my poverty …. In this country without vegetation, this country of stones, one thing exists, the hours. Here, sunrise and sunset are a drama in themselves.” Or: “dans la serenité pudique de la nuit, voilant la purité des choses, la soufrance et l’abjection des êtres.” Her services as a journalistic correspondent in Algiers would have been more valuable had they been more disciplined. She wouldn’t get away with that any more, she’d be locked up or shot, and that’s a reflection on us, the ultimate product of the nineteenth century’s “deterioration” of individualism and unctuously-tolerant intolerance of non-conformity, not on her …..

The delight of Lesley Blanch’s writing lies in a combination of an entirely feminine sort of robust sentimentality and a skill in placing her all-too-human characters in their own settings, when for example two hundred years ago as she chooses to describe it pre-industrial England was a bucolic placid meadow, the site of the present Palais Garnier was a vacant neglected space, the Champs Elysées a haunt of cut-throats, Athens a hastily erected shanty town around a heap of old ruins to which no-one paid any attention or even know what they were, Damascus a gorgeous city redolent of sensuality and refinement, the inner recesses of the forbidden Seraglio in Istanbul a savage labyrinthine jumbled maze beside a glittering ultramarine sea, and the mud-built North African desert settlements suggestive of an enticing squalor. A banquet for all incurable romantics

[Carla Coelho · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gostei imenso deste livro. Através dele fiquei a conhecer a vida de Lesley Blanch. Escritora, jornalista, viajante inveterada. Sobretudo alguém que agarrou a vida com as duas mãos e viveu o mais e o melhor que pode. O livro inclui uma parte de biografia, com a colaboração de Georgia de Chamberet, bem como artigos escritos por Lesley Blanch. Os temas são diversificados: os anos em que escreveu para a Vogue, as recordações de Roman Gari (com que foi casada) e as suas viagens (incluindo a paixão pela Rússia e a passagem pelo Médio Oriente, com especial destaque para a Turquia e o Afeganistão).
A escrita da autora é fluída e rica e, apesar de escrever na primeira pessoa, tem a capacidade de se "evaporar" do texto, não estando demasiado presente. Tudo isso faz com que em determinados momentos nos esqueçamos de que este é um livro de memórias e de recolha de textos da autora, pois quase parece um verdadeiro romance.

[Deena · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this quite a few years ago - can't think how I missed adding it here. Its biggest flaw, in my opinion, was that a good bit of it was speculative. Blanch found 4 women whose stories she thought were really cool - but there wasn't (apparently, for her) enough material on them to give each her own book, or even write a whole lot about what they actually did. Instead, Blanch spends a lot of time talking about what things "must" have felt or been like for these women. This is especially true about Dubucq de Rivery.

(The timing of the original writing & publication may have made it more difficult for Blanch to gain access to some material - but still.)

[Andrew Corcut · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written book by a remarkable woman. It is part autobiography, part travelogue and part biography of the author's former husband, the writer Romain Gary. The book evokes a lost era and the writing has the quality of a sepia photograph. Marvellous. Her prose reminds me very much of Patrick Leigh Fermor's in "A Time of Gifts." I read this book and am transported.

[Rosemary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four short biographies of Victorian-age women (not all British) who looked to the exotic East for adventure and romance, and found it at some great personal cost.

Elizabeth Burton was the wife of Richard Burton, the British adventurer, "Oriental" scholar (meaning expert in Arab, Persian, and other Near and Middle Eastern cultures), famous translator of The Arabian Nights, and African explorer who searched for the source of the Nile. Elizabeth set her cap for him, turning down other proposals, and eventually snagged him, then endured a long engagement. After the marriage, she became his virtual and willing slave, shepherding his many books through publication and living vicariously through him. Only later in life was she able to travel with him to the lands she had dreamed of. Both he and she were difficult, touchy persons who made many of their own problems in life. After Richard's death, Elizabeth burned his translation of a notorious erotic Arab manuscript The Scented Garden and all his notes (for which scholars and many others have never forgiven her, especially about the notes on his sources). She also burned his personal journals, which he had kept all his life, and other papers. I never cared for this lady to begin with and after reading this account disliked her even more.

Jane Digby kind of loved her way East. She became Lady Bennington (married off young to a noble husband, had one child, cheated on her husband to the point that it became the subject of gossip and her divorce decree had to be approved by Parliament). Before the divorce was final she had an affair and a child with a Venetian prince, then became Baroness Bennington, Countess Theotoky (Greek husband this time), and finally the wife of Sheik Abdul Medjul El Mezrab. There were many dalliances in between.

Aimée Dubuq de Rivery is the woman who made this book worth reading. She was born and grew up on the French island possession of Martinique alongside her cousin Josèphine, future wife of Napoleon Bonaparte. As a teen, Aimèe was sent to a convent in Nantes to be properly educated as a lady so that she might make a suitable marriage. The beautiful blond, blue-eyed girl completed her stay and set sail back to Martinique on a small vessel which was caught in a storm and began to sink. Fortunately all aboard were rescued in the middle of the night by a large Spanish trader. The next day as they were all drying out, their ship was overtaken by Algerian corsairs and Aimèe was seized as a top prize and locked in the captain's cabin under guard for her protection. The pirate captain took her to Algiers as a gift to his boss, Baba Mohammed Ben Osman. The boss, in turn, thought Aimèe would be the perfect offering with which to gain favor with the Sultan. A rich boat was quickly fitted out and Aimèe, dressed in a "lavish Oriental style and heavily veiled" was on her way to Constantinople. She is made part of the Sultan's harem (lots of interesting details about the power struggles among the women to position their sons to be the next Sultan, as well as daily life inside the palace), bears him a son who eventually becomes Sultan, and she herself becomes Sultana (mother of the Sultan, an extremely powerful position). She influences her son to be open to European influences, particularly French ones, but when Napoleon divorces Josèphine, the French Emperor finds himself without the Turkish support he needs in a battle with Russia. Aimèe is an extremely intelligent woman who was forced to become an odalisque but who learned the ways of the harem and how to maneuver her way through the plots and intrigues without becoming cruel and destructive. She did many positive things, often through her son, to improve the practices of the sultanate.

Isabelle Eberhardt was the child of a Russian general and a beautiful mother named Madame Nathalie de Moërder, née Korff-Eberhardt who, around 1870, left her comfortable St. Petersburg home and with her three children settled in Switzerland. Madame de Moërder also brought along the children's tutor, Alexander Trophimowsky, a handsome intellectual who was also her lover. (Her husband, the general, died a year or so later and left her all his money.) The former tutor would allow the children to study only what he chose. Isabelle learned six languages becoming especially proficient in Arabic. The household was chaotic and the children escaped as they could. Isabelle began dressing as a boy and, being tall, slim, and flat chested, she could carry this off well. She liked dressing up in Middle Eastern costumes. She and her mother moved to North Africa as they had many Arab friends and her brother was in Algeria. They were happily settled in the Algerian town of Bône and Isabelle began to write stories and her remarkable journal and to explore the desert. But shortly her mother died from a heart attack and Isabelle began to grieve and brood and return to an obsession with death she had long held. She returned to Europe to wind up her affaires and came back to Algeria. She met and fell in love with an Arab quartermaster of the French garrison who remained her lover but she had many other adventures through the desert often disguised as a man, though many of the Arabs knew she was a woman. Her journals and other writings are as legendary as she herself became.

I gave this book only three stars because the writing was overdone, especially on the first two biographies. Perhaps it is just my impatience with the subjects or my impatience with the writing, but at times I found the book tedious. But I must credit these four women for striking out and making their own way at a time when that was very difficult.

-fini-

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

It seems like a lot of these reviews are about the book's title "On the Wilder Shores of Love" but this is actually the biography pieced together of Lesley Blanch herself, not the novel. This could be leading to some confusing reviews.

I found it drippingly opulent with treasure, language, new words that required me looking them up constantly, names and furniture, travel and love and fashion and art... There is just so much pure indulgence of words that I did struggle to keep up any sort of pace at times. Some of it jarred with me a little but I did feel more informed after reading it. It was a long haul though with many stiles to climb.

[Tansy Hepton · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is not a romance, although the title might mislead you into thinking so. It is a set of 4 biographies of women who found their lives in the Middle East from the late 1700's to the early 1900's. Their stories are amazing - why are they not better known? Why weren't they taught about in schools?
This book should be astonishing, but somehow manages to makes these extraordinary lives dull. It may be the style of the 1950's (when it was written) but what a disappointment.
Call out to writers - please take on these stories and make these women famous!

[Kat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful Stories of Great Women

What makes a great woman, is it love, sacrifice, adventure, giving? Each of these women were great in their own way because they saw past the horizon they lived in to something more. They strived to be something more, to understand an area that no one cared to understand at the time. Each woman lived in her own way, they left last examples of never giving up, never quitting, and living life to the fullest in any way they could.

[Dvora Treisman · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading her wonderful Journey Into the Mind's Eye, I was disappointed with this. The four women seemed like cardboard figures, Aimee Dubucq de Ribery seemed like Blanch's concoction since she had no material from that time to go by, except the documented life and accomplishments of her son and that court, and the writing was poor, and it was often confusing.

[Ingrid Weir · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a unique book. Very much of another era, things have changed so much. I can't really say I related to any of the women in this book, more that I found them very, very interesting. We are all in a way captured by the times we live in. When an individual thinks differently and lives in a renegade way it's fascinating.

[Jann · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fascinating memoir by a romantic woman who broke the rules of expectation for a girl born in the Edwardian era. I don’t prefer biographies and memoirs, but I sped through this book with her accounts of romances,marriage, and an enormous amount of travel, off the beaten tourist tracks. This book was lent to me by a friend. I might not have read it otherwise, but am glad to have come across it.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

Years after picking this up in yellowing Penguin Classic format from a used bookshop in Notting Hill, I was actually prompted to read it by a mention of the book in a biography of Pamela Churchill (Jane Digby was an ancestor of hers). I just love the poetic style of writing of this era so thoroughly enjoyed it!

[Julie Du Brow · Rating 3 out of 5]

1st section/woman's story was too lengthy...but the rest were good length. Fascinating what these women each accomplished or how they directed themselves at that time. I vascilate to a 4* here. The research is amazing.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating stories and substantial writing! I was less of a fan of the first and fourth biographies, but the second and third were amazing. For having been written in 1954, it is only slightly dated in its use of stereotypes as descriptions.

[Elka Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore this book and reread it every couple of years - the women are characters - rogues, misfits and dreamers who dared to defy the conventions of their times and live life on their own terms.

[Arjanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow these women were much bolder than me and my friends more than 100 years later!