"Life's poetry never sank to prose", 1 February 2016

This review is from: On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life (Kindle Edition)
Couldnt put this down - biographies of four women who 'belonged to the West but dared to turn to the East for adventure and love.'
Thus such famous travellers as the more academic Lady Hester Stanhope are excluded, as the author focusses on more romantic tales.
Isabelle Burton's fevered love and devotion to her explorer husband.....Isabelle Eberhardt, child of a dysfunctional Russian emigre family, and her short and weird, hashish-fueled life in the Algerian desert.....and English aristocrat Lady Ellenborough, who worked her way East through a series of lovers and husbands to find true romance with her Sheihh.
Perhaps the fourth subject can hardly be said to have 'turned to the East', as she was forcibly abducted by Corsairs as she sailed home from her French convent school. Aimee Dubucq de Rivery ended up wife of the Sultan, but her westernizing influence on her son, the future Mahmoud II, was - the author contends - behind the stance Turkey adopted in numerous political events of the day.

The strict biographer might baulk at the author's use of imagination where she lacks documentary proof - "it is probable that Aimee... sometimes accompanied her son" etc. but I found this an unputdownable read. ( )

About Blanch and the book: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/11347881/On-the-Wilder-Shor...

I found this book on the bookshelf when I was vacationing with my family in the South of France. (Wow, that is possibly one of the most pretentious sentences I've every written. But that's I was.) It's beautifully evocative, instantly transported you back through time, into the lives of these fascinating women. My only caveat is that it comes from that period of oriental exoticism which means it has some problematic racial issues for the modern reader ( )

I found this book on the bookshelf when I was vacationing with my family in the South of France. (Wow, that is possibly one of the most pretentious sentences I've every written. But that's I was.) It's beautifully evocative, instantly transported you back through time, into the lives of these fascinating women. My only caveat is that it comes from that period of oriental exoticism which means it has some problematic racial issues for the modern reader ( )

This book is a compilation of four mini-bios of women who lived from the 18th Century to the very early 20th Century. The thread that weaves these women's stories together is that their hearts and lives were inexorably bound to the Near East, and all bucked convention in one way or another.

As a biography, it was written far too subjectively to be very good. The author made too many conjectures about her subjects' motives and about the states of their minds without very strong supporting evidence.

On the other hand, I loved this book, which read more like historical fiction, to me. I must admit, here, to a guilty-pleasure weakness for romantic exoticism, and this was thoroughly satisfying on that level. It's also always satisfying to read about and root for women who were strong enough to live lives outside the narrow confines of the role of women from earlier eras. ( )