The Wilder Shores of Love, Signed by Lesley Blanch
[Signed Presentation] Blanch, Lesley. The Wilder Shores of Love. English Edition, Fourth Printing. 1966. Book and dust jacket are both in very good condition—jacket shows minor tears to the spine ends. This copy is inscribed toBlanch's French translator. In her elegant hand, it is signed "Lesley Blanch" on the title page. On that same page, it is inscribed, "My first book, (without sharing authorship), with love, to my dear translator, interpreter is a better word—Lesley, Mar 2003."
Love and adventure are a thrilling combination, even more so when the era is the 19th Century; the backdrop is the mysterious and romantic Near East; and the author is the sublime Lesley Blanch. This book is a biography of four extraordinary women who were drawn there: Isabel Burton (wife of the explorer Richard Burton); Lady Jane Digby (each of her four marriages took her farther east until she was finally the consort of a Bedouin chieftain); the beautiful Aimée Dubucq de Rivery (the beautiful cousin of Josephine Bonaparte who was kidnapped by pirates but became the influential wife and mother of Turkish sultans); and Isabelle Eberhardt.
“If I were a man, I would be Richard Burton: but, being only a woman, I [will] be Richard Burton’s wife.”
--Isabel Burton