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

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In her memoir, Radner declared: “Now I had Epstein-Barr virus and mittelschmerz. Fitting diseases for the Queen of Neurosis.” 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. The Saturday Night Live actress admitted her “heart fluttered” when she first met Wilder on the set of Hanky Panky in 1981. About the Harem, the innermost women’s quarters of the Seraglio, Mme Blanch can say little since few if any Westerners ever entered one. Apparently, though, contrary to the image in torrid imaginations, strict discipline and formality prevailed, almost like a nunnery, because it was the women who actually held the power behind the throne, vied for their lord’s notice with fierce rivalry between them to place an heir on the throne. With native shrewdness Mlle de Rivery (now known as Naksh, The Beautiful One), learned fast, cultivating those she judged to be influential. Sultan Abd ul Hamid’s nephew Selim, a rather delicate young man with ‘progressive’ ideas, was his recognised heir; his First Wife, not progressive at all and relying on the support of the terrifying Janisseries, had every intention of advancing her own son at any price, and two ferocious factions had developed within the palace. The Beautiful One, having been expertly trained in the “arts of love”, and to the other’s fury, rapidly usurped her and had a son of her own who was the apple of his father’s eye. Half French and carefully and continuously watched over and guarded by his mother and with an education that was only half Turkish, the boy – having murdered his rival - survived to adulthood to become until 1839 Sultan Mahmud II of Turkey.

Mittelschmerz is also known as ovulation pain, and while it was an incorrect diagnosis for the ill actress, doctors were, at last, looking in the right area. We can agree about the “twentieth century disintegration”, that’s probably true enough. After about 1750, for some complicated reason, women’s choices as to how to live as individual humans in their own right became increasingly limited, so that by the later nineteenth they were down to about two – ministering angels or whores, for the most part an unbridgeable division. Twentieth century ‘feminism’ was mostly about breaking these stereotypes, never entirely successful and since arguably even less so. But in a way the geographical factor is incidental, unless it represents warmth and the need for less, or less restrictive, clothing, in itself suggestive to the Northern imagination of sensuality and ‘freedom’ though in fact as many or more social restrictions operate in the East as in the West and the Eastern countries have now become a target, accurately or otherwise, for those Western women worried about the ‘oppression’ of their oriental sisters. And as to the last sentence, that’s largely incomprehensible to the average man, for whom “love” is just another adventure amongst many other possibilities. To the male characters in this book it meant nothing much at all. Of course they loved the women they were involved with, but in a different way; it was not the be-all-end-all of their existences, it was not “a means of individual expression, liberation and fulfilment. That came from other wider and more diverse sources, and here we meet the eternal predicament known as the battle of the sexes, most strikingly represented in the first and longest in this collection of biographical essays.

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. Burton was a man "gone native" who disappeared for years on end into the empty quarter, Mecca and various parts of Africa and India only to re-emerge clutching fistfuls of what the Victorian public would swiftly label as pornographic literature. Isabel allegedly married him in the hope that she would be able to accompany him on some of his more outlandish excursions, instead she ended up as his copy editor, sitting behind a desk at home while hubby plunged off into another uncharted swamp or desert. El-Mezrab was a tribal leader who waged war, made love and engaged in local politiking from the comfort of his Bedouin tent with Lady Ellenborough (Digby) as consort. Aimee Du Becq de Rivery was captured by Barbary Corsairs, sold to the Sultan of Istanbul as a concubine and fought her way up the Seraglio ranks to become Sultana, mother of the heir to the Ottoman throne and one of the most under-rated but influential women in European politics at the time. Eberhardt met an untimely end in a flash flood in Algeria but not before she had married Slimane Ehnni, dabled in Sufi Mysticism and adopted Islam as her religion. I read this quite a few years ago - can't think how I missed adding it here. Its biggest flaw, in my opinion, was that a good bit of it was speculative. Blanch found 4 women whose stories she thought were really cool - but there wasn't (apparently, for her) enough material on them to give each her own book, or even write a whole lot about what they actually did. Instead, Blanch spends a lot of time talking about what things "must" have felt or been like for these women. This is especially true about Dubucq de Rivery. She had once been told by a gypsy called Hagar Burton that she would meet a man with the same surname. So destiny began working. However, It took ten years for Isabel to marry Burton as her parents were against him but in the end it all worked and she lived a wonderful but very demanding life. 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.

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. Our servers are getting hit pretty hard right now. To continue shopping, enter the characters as they are shown 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. Recommendation: Unless you’re a total Lawrence of Arabia / French Foreign Legion fan, you might want to pass on this one.A friend described the couple as “constant honeymooners” five years after their wedding but no one knew the troubles that awaited. 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.