Customer Reviews

The Wilder Shores of Love: The Exotic True-Life Stories of Isabel Burton, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, Jane Digby, and Isabelle Eberhardt

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These accounts of four western women and how they lived in exotic lands serve best as an introduction, not as a particularly authoritative reference.

Definitely more high-brow than romance novels, if only by virtue of being true personalities, this book is a welcome bit of romantic escapism. Despite the fact that the author clearly admires and reveres these intelligent and adventurous women, the book disappoints on a couple of fronts. The writing (nearly half a century old) is peppered with somewhat embarassing colonial language about native beauty, genetically determined intelligence, and primitive sexiness. No blatant racism here, but plenty of indulgent speculation that comes off poorly today.

I found it annoying that the author used French liberally but without any attempt at translation; this usually appears in quotations and with a disclaimer that the flavor of the original language would be lost in any translation. I disagree: a skilled translator could handle it beautifully.

I personally enjoyed these accounts of the lives of women who ventured beyond the realm of other western women, who supported great men, or who even changed the course of history. But I felt I had received only part of the stories. I have yet to find more writings about these women, but I am sure they are out there. A very entertaining introduction to each subject's life.

This book will stay with you for a long time. The lives of the women were remarkable, interesting, glamorous and ahead of their time. Wilder Shores details lives less ordinary and in doing so evokes a strong emotional tie to the reader. It's the kind of book that allows one to imagine, to really put themselves emotionally and physically, having lived a life of adventure and daring. What is striking is that these women would never have said that about their own lives. Times were different and they paid a price for living life on their terms and defined by their hearts. I highly suggest this rich and rewarding book. You will learn with this book as well as find yourself entertained. I too read this book years ago and sought it out again. Now that I have a copy it is part of my personal library.

I wouldn't have known about this book if I hadn't read Lesley Blanch's recent obit in the NY Times (May 11, 2007). It sounded too good to pass up, and it's a great read. Her writing style, for a biography, is over the top even for 50 years ago, but it's obvious she was enjoying herself in the telling, and it's a very readable book. HOWEVER, as soon as you read Ms Blanch's intro, you find a reference to an illustration, but when you check the book for pictures, there are none. Turns out the hardcover first ed. had pictures, and some subsequent paperback editions printed in England kept the illustrations, but the newer paperback editions dumped them. Well, shame on Scribners for not including them! It does take something away from the narrative not to be able to see whatever the author was able to locate on the women, whether photos or portraits. But still an entertaining read.

God what a beautiful collection of real life stories and ones about women that way up most braggart adventures of men!(and I say that as a guy folks!). I was in a state of awe & envy throughout, fell dangerously in love with 3 out of 4 of the characters and am left disappointed only by my own world in result. This book is highly detailed and revealing of ins and outs of secret minds, hearts, places, women, individuals, religion, history and in many ways is scarily telling about truths of all. Its a gorgeous voyage and I give this book away too often but its one of those you know? Men or women I dare you to call yourself the same by its end!

"Did I have adventures with foreign men?'' Lesley Blanch told an interviewer on her 100th birthday. "Many times --- I like them.''

Even at that advanced age, she was still writing. Always to music, most often reggae. At night, she'd greet visitors --- she was fond of hashish dealers --- to her exotic house on the French-Italian border in clothes that matched her environment: a caftan and turban, her neck fighting a load of ethnic jewelry.

To the very end of her life --- Lesley Blanch died in the spring of 1907, at 102 --- she was wildly entertaining. But her big personality is just icing. As "The Wilder Shores of Love" attests, she was a very good writer with a gift for telling remarkable stories, many of them probably true. And she was the ideal writer to profile four 19th century women who defied convention and went off to make fresh starts in North Africa and the Middle East. Or, as she called them, "four northern shadows flitting across a southern landscape."

Her focus was as exotic as her prose: "love as a means of individual expression, of liberation and fulfillment within that radiant periphery." Her women weren't head-in-the-stars about love; they were "realists of romance." And the book works brilliantly because, though the lives of Blanch's women were only superficially similar, their priorities were the same --- breathing the oxygen that was only available on the wilder shores of love.

Isabel Burton: Blanch chose her because she was "the supreme example of a woman who lived and had her being entirely through love." From the minute she saw them, she craved the East and the famous Victorian traveler, Richard Burton. (He spoke 28 languages. Blanch writes, one of them pornography.) Once she got him, their lives became a Greek drama: She colonized him and destroyed him, and, in the process, destroyed herself. But to what astonishing heights destruction took them --- Isabel worked tirelessly on Richard's behalf and, more or less singlehandedly, turned him into a celebrity. "I have undertaken a very peculiar man," she wrote in the early days of the marriage. He could have said the same: She traveled with 59 trunks, stayed for days in harems, and, meeting her wayward husband by chance in Venice, said hello and shook his hand.

Jane Digby: "She smashed all the taboos of her time," Blanch writes. "Hers was a life lived entirely against the rules, reasons and warnings, and it was triumphantly happy." You may disagree --- Digby experienced the ultimate tragedy when her beloved six-year-old son slid down a balcony, miscalculated and fell to his death at her feet. But the rest? One fabulous love affair after another, culminating in the marriage to Sheik Abdul Medjuel El Mezrab. Jane was always a great horsewoman; now she mastered dromedaries, and often raced at the head of a Bedouin tribe. She prepared her husband's food, stood as he ate, washed his feet. And the outcome? She never became old. "Admiration and love," Blanch notes, "are the best beauty treatments."

Aimée Dubucq de Rivery: Romantic? How's this: captured by pirates, flunk into a harem and enslaved. Her first sight in her new life in Turkey was "a great pyramid of heads, some so newly severed that they reeked and steamed with blood." She became "the French Sultana," the mother of Sultan Mahmoud II (who helped create modern Turkey) and a force for freedom and justice --- quite the tale.

Isabelle Eberhardt: She dressed as a man. She turned Arab. A Russian, she converted to Islam and died --- actually: drowned --- in the desert. "She adored her insignificant husband, but her sensual adventures were without number," Blanch writes, matter-of-factly. "Her behavior was outrageous; she drank, she smoked hashish, but déclassée, she remained racée." No one who met her ever forgot her. You won't either.

Subjects and author been rarely been better matched. For despite her sympathies with travel and romantic adventure, Lesley Blanch was a serious writer. Though well-born, she was also born poor; she worked hard from a young age, first as a book illustrator, then as Features Editor of British Vogue. Over her career, she wrote 18 books, all in longhand. The combination of a good education, intense research, remarkable subjects and a vivid style is irresistible --- "Wilder Shores" has never been out of print since its publication in 1954.

In 1954 Lesley Blanch, a hard-headed romantic, brought out her affectionate studies of four determined women who followed their dreams Eastward without regard for consequences. Even the demure Aimee, abducted and sold as a slave, doggedly created a life for herself within a Turkish seraglio. Recent muddled books on these women often verge on either the pornographic or the bathetic; Blanch's account was light-hearted; her humor, sympathy, and realism tempered her admiration. This was a best-seller in 1954, and is still immensely readable -- even if Blanch spoke more languages than some annoyed reviewers, and was not suitably PC for 2003. Her autobiography is excellent too.

Originally published in 1954 and quickly becoming a best seller; The Wilder Shores of Love portrays four admirable women who, by fate and conscious design, lived their lives brimming with dangerous adventure, passion and political savvy that threw nineteenth century society into a stir of envied condemnation.

Jane Digby, `impervious to scandal', made her way across Europe like a whirling dervish of all consuming passion. Among her many flames (the list is not exhaustive) were Prince Schwarzenburg, Balzac, King Ludwig I of Bavaria and his son; Otto, King of Greece, followed by an Albanian Chieftain and a couple of Arab Sheikhs. The last with whom she settled in Syria, alternating between Damascus and desert tribal warfare in which she participated; all of this at a time when `Queen Victoria refused to countenance the remarriage of widows'. She was also a woman of great intellect, spoke nine languages fluently and retained her naiveté until the end.

By contrast, Isabel Burton and Aimee Dubucq de Rivery displayed a singular sense of purpose that defied what was possible: Isabelle Burton, hypnotised by her husband to be, the awesome Richard Burton (explorer, orientalist, linguist - a kind of Livingston, Byron, T.E. Lawrence and Fitzroy Maclean all rolled into one), clung to a gipsy prophecy for nine years before she got her man. Blanch takes their relationship as a metaphor between east and west; Catholic, domesticated Isabel who was also a consummate organiser and genius Burton, who could disappear for months on end to go native, re-emerging with sensitive information that the foreign office rarely took on board.

Then there is the fascinating tale of Aimee Dubucq de Rivery; kidnapped by corsairs whilst sailing to France and despatched to the harem in Constantinople for the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. A worthy prize if ever there was one, her son became the famous reformer Sultan Mahmoud II. Blanch surveys European politics from the latticed seclusion of the harem, giving a unique perspective from this abducted beauty who was more powerful than we'll ever know. Her childhood cousin, Josephine, became Napoleon's first wife.

The fourth portrait is of Isabel Eberhardt; rebel, writer, adventurer. She has a hard act to follow and doesn't come off as fascinating as the previous three but is nevertheless extraordinary in her own right.

Lesley Blanch chose her subject matter well and contrasts her four portrait sitters with the backcloth of their age. The transition of nineteenth century England from the Regency period to the Victorian era she describes as `The century's smothering growth of prudery'.

This is a scintillating kaleidoscope of landscapes, personalities, cultures and attitudes that offers a political insight equal to its task. It reminds us in our politically correct age that there have been real women of daring who enlivened society and challenged its boundaries in an unconventional way; yet in the end, it is more a quintet than quartet, as Lesley Blanch herself is up there with the best of them: A must read!

I read this book years ago and sought it out much later, hoping it would be out of print and I could republish it. Even though I was disappointed to find it already in a new edition, you won't be disappointed!

... 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.

I have only read the first story but it is great. Looking forward to the other two..