- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Phoenix; New edition edition (5 Aug 1993)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1857990625
- ISBN-13: 978-1857990621
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 2.4 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
452,539 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #45 in Books > Biography > Essays, Journals & Letters > 19th Century
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Product Description
Review
'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.' (Val Hennessy DAILY MAIL )
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
Four women who dared to live their romantic fantasies, not just dream them. Aimee Dubucq de Rivery was a convent girl who was captured by pirates and forced to join the enormous harem of the Turkish sultan. Lady Ellenborough was a society beauty who fled London and became notorious for her love affairs with the important men of Europe, including two kings - Ludwig of Bavaria and Otho of Greece, then she lived with an Arab sheik in Syria for almost 30 years. Isabel Burton travelled to exotic lands with her explorer husband. Isabelle Eberhardt was born and raised in Switzerland and grew up as a nonconformist, feeling most comfortable in boy's clothes. She lived among the Arabs in the North African desert and described her surroundings in travel writings and journals. Yet although of widely different natures, backgrounds and origins, all had this in common - each found, in the East, 'glowing horizons of emotion and daring'. And each of them, in their own way, used love as a means of individual expression, of liberation and fulfilment.
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book, first published over 50 years ago, tells the stories of four European ladies in search of adventure. The tale of Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, given as a sumptuous present to the Sultan of Turkey at the end of the 18th Century, succeeds in painting a picture of a court of exceptional extravagance & extreme barbarity, a world away from the social conformities of western Europe. Aimee's son went on to be the first reformer in the Ottoman Empire.
It was such a very foreign world to me that I went on to read five more books about Turkey, from the Ottomans to Ataturk. It's been an enthralling learning curve.
It was such a very foreign world to me that I went on to read five more books about Turkey, from the Ottomans to Ataturk. It's been an enthralling learning curve.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I first read this book when I was 17 yrs old. It was given to me as a gift on a trip to Egypt and I found it to be a fascinating read. All of the woman portrayed were adventurous in completely different ways. It appealed to the wanderlust in me and I think it makes a fantastic gift for anyone who wants to take a trip somewhere foreign but lacks the courage to carry out that wish.
I won't go into further detail as I do not want to spoil it, all I can say is READ THIS BOOK!
Enjoy
I won't go into further detail as I do not want to spoil it, all I can say is READ THIS BOOK!
Enjoy
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
... to use that sociological term for marrying out of your immediate clan. Lesley Blanch has chosen the lives of four dynamic 19th Century women, all of whom followed "the path less traveled," three voluntarily. Another sub-set of the three left their northern climes for "adventure" and much else on the eastern and southern sides of the Mediterranean. All are worthwhile, even amazing stories. The most unfortunate aspect of the book(s) is (are) the cover(s)! My copy was published by "Abacus," a British publisher, and the edition most readily available through Amazon is available through Da Capo Press. Both feature a languid, passive, bare-breasted woman, in the finest tradition of "Orientalist" crap; just swallow hard, or ripe the cover off, because there is nothing "languid" about these women.
Other reviewers have described the four, so briefly they were Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, the one whose adventure was not voluntary. She was captured by pirates, sold into the Sultan's harem in Istanbul, and became the mother of Sultan Mahmoud II, who helped create modern Turkey. Isabel Burton, the wife, and promoter of Sir Richard Burton, the famous explorer, and linguist, who spoke 28 languages. The one who used her "charms" the most, cutting a broad swath across the rich, powerful, and famous of Europe before establishing herself as the wife of a Sheikh in Syria was Jane Digby, a/k/a Lady Ellenborough. She and George Sand, well, it's certainly not the right expression, and I'm not sure what is, "crossed swords," in sharing Honoré de Balzac. And the last, Isabelle Eberhardt, bedeviled the French colonial administration in Algeria, but was a confidant General Lyautey, and was to die at the age of 27, in a desert flood.
Not only did Blanche make an excellent selection, based on careful research, she writes well, with insight and erudition. Consider the beginning of the chapter on Jane Digby: "There are two sorts of romantics: those who love, and those who love the adventure of loving." Clearly Digby was in the latter category. When she met her husband to be, the Syrian sheikh, she was in her late forties, and Blanche's assessment is: "It is probably that by her wayward life she had acquired a hunger the more pallid Western men could not longer assuage." They were married for 25 years.
There were other women, notably Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, who made their "mark," and left their own written accounts of their travels and adventures in the Middle East, during the late 19th Century and early 20th. I had previously read about the singular life of Isabelle Eberhardt, but the other three women's stories were completely new to me. Kudos to Ms. Blanche for bringing them to light, and telling their story so well. As other reviewers have indicated, Ms. Blanche is also a remarkable woman in her own right, vigorous to the end, at 102. A solid 5-star read.
(Note: Review first published at Amazon, USA, on March 31, 2010)
Other reviewers have described the four, so briefly they were Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, the one whose adventure was not voluntary. She was captured by pirates, sold into the Sultan's harem in Istanbul, and became the mother of Sultan Mahmoud II, who helped create modern Turkey. Isabel Burton, the wife, and promoter of Sir Richard Burton, the famous explorer, and linguist, who spoke 28 languages. The one who used her "charms" the most, cutting a broad swath across the rich, powerful, and famous of Europe before establishing herself as the wife of a Sheikh in Syria was Jane Digby, a/k/a Lady Ellenborough. She and George Sand, well, it's certainly not the right expression, and I'm not sure what is, "crossed swords," in sharing Honoré de Balzac. And the last, Isabelle Eberhardt, bedeviled the French colonial administration in Algeria, but was a confidant General Lyautey, and was to die at the age of 27, in a desert flood.
Not only did Blanche make an excellent selection, based on careful research, she writes well, with insight and erudition. Consider the beginning of the chapter on Jane Digby: "There are two sorts of romantics: those who love, and those who love the adventure of loving." Clearly Digby was in the latter category. When she met her husband to be, the Syrian sheikh, she was in her late forties, and Blanche's assessment is: "It is probably that by her wayward life she had acquired a hunger the more pallid Western men could not longer assuage." They were married for 25 years.
There were other women, notably Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, who made their "mark," and left their own written accounts of their travels and adventures in the Middle East, during the late 19th Century and early 20th. I had previously read about the singular life of Isabelle Eberhardt, but the other three women's stories were completely new to me. Kudos to Ms. Blanche for bringing them to light, and telling their story so well. As other reviewers have indicated, Ms. Blanche is also a remarkable woman in her own right, vigorous to the end, at 102. A solid 5-star read.
(Note: Review first published at Amazon, USA, on March 31, 2010)
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Interesting Characters
While the characters are interesting, the author's old-fashioned and presumptuous writing style detracts considerably from the pleasure of reading about them. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Mr. A. J. Clark
Ignore the title ..........
..... which makes it sound a bit Mills and Boon. This is a fascinating book about very exceptional and adventurous women- especially if you bear in mind the time they lived in. Read more
Published 15 months ago by Mary Evans
Unique book of adventures of outrageous 19th century women
I read this book years ago and sought it out much later, hoping it would be out of print and I could republish it. Read more
Published on 16 Feb 1999
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