Review
Val Hennessy, Daily Mail: ‘Their true stories, first told grippingly by Blanch in 1954, are amazing . . . makes you realise that we, with our wimpish long-haul packages and compulsory travel insurance, don't know we're born.’
Book Description
Originally published in 1954, The Wilder Shores of Love pioneered a new kind of group biography focusing on four nineteenth-century European women "escaping the boredom of convention". They leave behind them the industrialized West for the Middle East, to find love, fulfillment, and "glowing horizons of emotion and daring".
Isabel Burton (who married the Arabist and explorer Richard), Jane Digby el-Mezrab (Lady Ellenborough, the society beauty who ended up living in the Syrian desert with a Bedouin chieftain), Aimée Dubucq de Rivery (a French convent girl captured by pirates who was gifted to the Sultan’s harem in Istanbul), and Isabelle Eberhardt (a Swiss-Russian linguist who felt most comfortable in boy’s clothes and lived among the Arabs in the Sahara).
A scholarly romantic, Lesley Blanch influenced and inspired generations of writers, readers and critics. The Wilder Shores of Love has remained in print in English since it was first published, and is considered to be an excellent example of the genre narrative non-fiction.
About the Author
Lesley Blanch was a distinguished writer, artist, drama critic, and features editor of British Vogue during World War II. The author of twelve books, including Journey into the Mind's Eye, Pierre Loti and The Sabres of Paradise, she died in 2007, age 103. Her memoirs On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life are published by Virago (15 Jan 2015).
Val Hennessy, Daily Mail: ‘Their true stories, first told grippingly by Blanch in 1954, are amazing . . . makes you realise that we, with our wimpish long-haul packages and compulsory travel insurance, don't know we're born.’
Book Description
Originally published in 1954, The Wilder Shores of Love pioneered a new kind of group biography focusing on four nineteenth-century European women "escaping the boredom of convention". They leave behind them the industrialized West for the Middle East, to find love, fulfillment, and "glowing horizons of emotion and daring".
Isabel Burton (who married the Arabist and explorer Richard), Jane Digby el-Mezrab (Lady Ellenborough, the society beauty who ended up living in the Syrian desert with a Bedouin chieftain), Aimée Dubucq de Rivery (a French convent girl captured by pirates who was gifted to the Sultan’s harem in Istanbul), and Isabelle Eberhardt (a Swiss-Russian linguist who felt most comfortable in boy’s clothes and lived among the Arabs in the Sahara).
A scholarly romantic, Lesley Blanch influenced and inspired generations of writers, readers and critics. The Wilder Shores of Love has remained in print in English since it was first published, and is considered to be an excellent example of the genre narrative non-fiction.
About the Author
Lesley Blanch was a distinguished writer, artist, drama critic, and features editor of British Vogue during World War II. The author of twelve books, including Journey into the Mind's Eye, Pierre Loti and The Sabres of Paradise, she died in 2007, age 103. Her memoirs On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life are published by Virago (15 Jan 2015).
