As her symptoms worsened she was diagnosed with Epstein-Barr virus, a common illness that causes fatigue. 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 “When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.” The Willy Wonka actor reportedly avoided Radner’s earliest advances out of respect for her husband, and she began to confide in him about her unhappy marriage. Richard and Isabel Burton: This was the chapter that I most looked forward to, having had a fascination with especially Richard Burton for a long while, because of his translation of One Thousand and One Nights. Their chapter lived up to my expectations. One of these days I'm going to read a full length biography on them both.

Eventually the couple used pseudonyms, Lorna and Stanley Blake, to avoid the press and nurtured their adorable relationship throughout the treatment. 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.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 “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.” 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. The Haunted Honeymoon actress suffered two miscarriages and IVF also proved to be pointless as the star was told she was infertile. Recommendation: Unless you’re a total Lawrence of Arabia / French Foreign Legion fan, you might want to pass on this one.

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. In her memoir, Radner declared: “Now I had Epstein-Barr virus and mittelschmerz. Fitting diseases for the Queen of Neurosis.” In part one, we meet Isabel Burton who in her youth read all about the exploits and adventures of Richard Burton, the incredibly famous warrior for hire, adventurer, linguist, archaeologist, and translator. So she decided to marry him. Their marriage together involved a kind dynamic we see a lot now with celeb married to a normie, with a heavy dose of codependency and compromise. They also spent incredibly long periods of time apart from one another too.At the time, Radner was still married to her first husband G.E. Smith but Wilder had been mostly single since divorcing his second wife Mary Schutz in 1974. At 15, I was enthralled by the dashing adventures of these four Victorian women who defied the boredom of their culturally prescribed lives to escape to the Middle East. The book is exciting and conversational enough to entice a surly teenager into loving it, even one who would rather have been dancing in discos than digging in deserts. Isabelle even cross-dressed in England and in the Sahara, a fact which moved me. The New York Times noted later that year: “All of Mr Wilder’s future plans appear to include Miss Radner.” 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. Use italics (lyric) and bold (lyric) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song part

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.Around the same time, the actress began feeling off, struggling to stay awake during work and social engagements and often felt faint. Known as the two funniest actors of 20th century Hollywood, fans were delighted when Radner and Wilder announced their relationship. During the filming of Hanky Panky the pair remained friends, but when Radner officially divorced her husband in 1982 they instantly reconnected and became inseparable.

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. Doctors believed the symptoms were partly connected to her depression as they could not find anything wrong with her stomach. 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. 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. He wrote: “In June we went to Paris, and I took her to my favourite bistro. After we ate, she started feeling uncomfortable, and the discomfort grew when we went outside walking on the street.

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. 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.