Wilder Shores of Love, Signed by Lesley Blanch
[Signed Presentation by Lesley Blanch] Blanch, Lesley. The Wilder Shores of Love. American Edition, Second Printing. 1954. Book and dust jacket are both in good plus condition—seam has been repaired with archival tape, and jacket shows mild fraying to upper edges, a tape-repaired tear to the spine, and a small chip to the upper front corner. Book is warmly inscribed to the screenwriter Robert Presnelle, Jr. and his wife, the actress Marsha Hunt, ‘For Bob Presnell, and for Marsha, and King and Canute, with the authors’ love, Lesley Blanch Gary.”
They say one should write about what one knows, and Lesley Blanch knew this subject intimately. The four women she profiles in The Wilder Shores of Love—Isabel Burton, Jane Digby, Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, and Isabelle Eberhardt—were ruled by the same wanderlust, romantic imagination, and impatience with convention that animated Blanch herself. Each escaped, or tried to escape, the stifling expectations of her age: Burton through marriage to the great explorer Richard Burton; Digby through serial scandal and a final life among the Bedouin; Dubucq de Rivery, at least in legend, through abduction into a Constantinople harem and astonishing elevation at the Ottoman court; and Eberhardt through the Sahara, where she traveled on horseback, wrote brilliantly, and often lived as a man.
This presentation copy was inscribed during Blanch’s marriage to Romain Gary, the Prix Goncourt-winning novelist and French consul in Los Angeles in the late 1950s. Their circle had its own romantic voltage, joining Old Hollywood figures such as David and Jennifer Selznick with the French New Wave world that would soon bring Gary together with Jean Seberg, his second wife after his divorce from Blanch.
“Los Angeles, for all its meretricious tinselly charm, was place where both of us found we could write well. Other writers also found it congenial: Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood notably. None of us could explain why this should be, but both Romain and myself wrote, I think, our best books there.”
--Lesley Blanch