Oscar Wilde’s words on love are a keen observer of our human condition with insights that pave open the gates to edens multi faceted paths. Although the doctors explained she would not be able to have children, they had not expressly diagnosed her with anything life-threatening. 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.

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.”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. Wilder was reportedly told soon after Radner’s diagnosis that she only had a small chance of surviving, but he never shared the news with his beloved.

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. Known as the two funniest actors of 20th century Hollywood, fans were delighted when Radner and Wilder announced their relationship. Mittelschmerz is also known as ovulation pain, and while it was an incorrect diagnosis for the ill actress, doctors were, at last, looking in the right area. 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.Use italics (lyric) and bold (lyric) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song part 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. Oscar Wilde love quote “Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.” Eventually the couple used pseudonyms, Lorna and Stanley Blake, to avoid the press and nurtured their adorable relationship throughout the treatment.

Aimée du Buc de Rivéry: One of my favourite chapters in the book. We know that she disappeared at sea, but there is a prevailing legend that she was captured at sea, and that she supposedly spent the rest of her life in the harem of the Ottoman Empire. According to current historians, it's not been substantiated whether or not those two women are one and the same. Regardless, Lesley Blanch tells you this legendary story most engagingly. Recommendation: Unless you’re a total Lawrence of Arabia / French Foreign Legion fan, you might want to pass on this one. 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. 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. 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.

Around the same time, the actress began feeling off, struggling to stay awake during work and social engagements and often felt faint. A friend described the couple as “constant honeymooners” five years after their wedding but no one knew the troubles that awaited. 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.Physicians immediately enrolled the actress in chemotherapy but her treatments were often bombarded by reporters looking for information on her condition and to speak to her husband. Our servers are getting hit pretty hard right now. To continue shopping, enter the characters as they are shown I don’t write fiction because I can’t invent. For biography I have to remember, and then work round a character. In biography you don’t invent anything, but you interpret. However, that doesn’t mean that you don’t use your imagination." 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.