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 they know, and here, Lesley Blanch did, with great flair. It was a personality type she knew because it was her own. Blanch had the same wanderlust and romantic nature that ruled the lives of the four women she writes of here, all of whom defied the stifling Victorian social conventions of their era. Included in this quartet are Isabel Burton (wife of the explorer Richard Burton who translated into English the Kama Sutra and Arabian Nights); Lady Jane Digby (the great-great aunt of Pamela Harriman who scandalized her family by marrying four times until finally becoming the consort of a Bedouin chieftain); the beautiful Aimée Dubucq de Rivery (the cousin of Josephine Bonaparte who was kidnapped by pirates and sold into a Constantinople harem but skyrocketed through the ranks, becoming first the wife and then the mother to Turkish sultans); and the cross-dressing Isabelle Eberhardt (who wrote about her experiences traveling on horseback through the Sahara, living among local tribes while posing as a man). This copy was inscribed when Blanch was married Romain Gary, the Prix Goncourt-winning writer who was the French consul in Los Angeles in the late fifties. Theirs was a glamorous Hollywood circle, including industry stalwarts like David and Jennifer Selznick, as well as French New Wave devotees (including the tragic Jean Seberg, who became Romain Gary’s wife following 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