The Wilder Shores of Love, by Lesley Blanch (Phoenix, 7.99 in UK) For most women raised and educated within the secular, liberal Western tradition in the second half of this century, the idea of seeking sexual and spiritual fulfilment in the East is something of a non-starter; but in this entertaining and often delightfully gossipy book Lesley Blanch traces the lives of four 19th-century European women who did exactly that. Blanch has selected her subjects carefully, for they adopted four different approaches to the business of relationships (always a tricky one, but almost insurmountably so in an East-West context). Thus we have the wife: Isabel Burton, married to Richard, editor of The Thou- sand Nights and a Night and, by Blanch's reckoning, a bit of a cold fish, despite Isabel's sighs and protestations to the contrary. Next comes the mistress: the beautiful Jane Digby El Mezrab, who scandalised Victorian England by running off with an Austrian prince and hardly redeemed herself by marrying, when she was almost fifty, an Arab sheikh. Third is the slave: Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, a Creole convent girl who was captured by Algerian pirates on her way home to Martinique from her Nantes boarding school and presented as a gift to the Turkish sultan.
Having made her way through the ranks of the harem she eventually, as the mother of Sultan Mahmoud II, occupied one of the influential political positions in the Ottoman Empire, and her story would seem to be the most extraordinary of the four, were it not topped by the final section devoted to the adventures of Isabelle Eberhardt, the Russian-born transvestite, alcoholic and linguist, who coped with men by becoming one - and one whose feisty response to a tough environment earned the admiration of his Arab peers, at that - and who eventually drowned in the desert at the age of twenty-seven. Blanch's lively style gives her book the urgency of a whodunnit, and she pounces on every telling detail with an almost audible "gotcha!" The amount of credence she places in prophecy and astrology has to be filed under "dubious", but this is a terrific read.
Arminta Wallace