Wilder Love: Second Chance Standalone Romance (Love and Chaos)

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Her god-daughter calls her “ a Sheherezade figure”. Blanch romanticises in vivid detail her girlhood in the years leading up to World War One. She had a baby by an Italian soldier, gave it up for adoption and never mentions it again. I couldn’t decide whether she was heartbroken or heartless. Her first teenage impression of Florence was that it was “ forbidding”; Venice was “ draughty”. Oscar Wilde love quote “You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.” 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. The Wilder Shores of Love was published in 1954, and I first read it at the age of 15 in 1969. I was living with my parents on an archeological excavation in Iran, and greedily reading my way through the dig's library. The Wilder Shores of Love was included in the dig shelves of Ross Macdonald mysteries and Angélique historical romances. Admittedly, Arabian nights and Turkish delights have never held much excitement for my fancy, so the setting of Lesley Blanch’s four-woman, biographical vignettes, THE WILDER SHORES OF LOVE, combined with her stilted, formal, presentation, may have been a part of the reasons I found it rather uninteresting.

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." The third study goes inside the seraglio where Aimee Dubucq De Rivery, cousin of Josephine of Napoleonic fame, was spirited when her ship was taken over. She learned much of politics from the inside machinations among the women and their respective sons in line for the rule as Sultan, and seems to have had quite an influence on middle-eastern foreign affairs through her connections before her son became a reformer during his reign.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. There's a whole lot of Burton-love flying about on Goodreads and it has prompted me to write this review. Should you chance across this book while perusing a thrift store or second hand book shop, your hand may graze across the spine and you would be forgiven for immediately thinking that this is some kind of saucy laydee romance novel. If you bought it thinking it was a saucy laydee novel then you will be sorely disappointed.

In her memoir, Radner declared: “Now I had Epstein-Barr virus and mittelschmerz. Fitting diseases for the Queen of Neurosis.”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. Lovers and married couples were observed by Wilde from the outside and dealt with lightheartedly in the plays, while his major poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol contains his deeper feelings on the subject of love. The phrase ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ comes from this poem, and has become an iconic phrase in reference to the LGBT community. The poem itself is rather sad and completely devoid of the lightness and cynical acidity of Wilde’s general quotes about love and marriage. Lesley Blanch, who died at the age of 103 in 2007, must be the very last of the great Bohemians. She wrote about fashion and interior design for Vogue and published books celebrating her passion for Russia and the Balkans. This new compilation has been put together by her god-daughter and includes some of Blanch’s travel writing, a retrospective memoir of her Edwardian childhood and (previously published only in French) the story of her marriage to the Russian-French soldier-diplomat and writer Romain Gary.

Jane Digby: What a fascinating woman! Not always a fan of her choices, though. She travelled a great deal throughout her life. One of the places she spent time in was Paris, where she met Balzac, who based one of his characters on her (Lady Arabelle Dudley in Le Lys dans la vallée). Her years in the Syrian desert as the wife of Sheik Abdul Madjuel El Mezrab was especially interesting to me. Overall, an incredibly eventful journey that I loved reading. 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.” 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. 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. This book is actually a very engaging account of four women who threw off their corsets, shouted "to hell with convention" and decided to go and get some action in the Middle East. The four women in question are Isabel Burton who pursued and married Richard Francis Burton with what can only be described as frightening determination, Jane Digby el-Mezrab ( a proper English lady in both senses of the word), Aimee Du Becq de Rivery (cousin of Josephine Bonaparte) and Isabelle Eberhardt (the cross-dressing linguist). All four women came from educated, upper class families but sought an escape in the desert, and normally in the arms of men who society would have deemed utterly inappropriate at the time.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. Isabelle Eberhardt: She dressed up as a man in the Arab desert, so I knew I was in for a great journey. I liked her story a lot. A true rebel. Her horoscope at the end was a nice touch. Wilder assured her she would be okay and that he would be waiting for her after the scan, but she was tragically correct in her fears and didn’t wake up again before dying three days later at the age of 42. 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.

Oscar Wilde love quote “Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.”Doctors believed the symptoms were partly connected to her depression as they could not find anything wrong with her stomach. In May 1989 Radner was taken to a CAT scan and fought the sedation as she was terrified she would not wake up again.