Lesley Blanch

The Caucasus--a region of supreme natural beauty and fiercely proud warriors--has throughout history been characterized by violence and turmoil. During the Great Caucasus War of 1834-1859, the warring mountain tribes of Daghestan and Chechnya united under the charismatic leadership of the Muslim chieftain Imam Shamyl, the "Lion of Daghestan", and held at bay the invading Russian army for nearly 25 years. Lesley Blanch vividly recounts the epic story of their heroic and bloody struggle for freedom and the life of a man still legendary in the Caucasus.

Conquest and Vengeance in the Caucasus, Revised Edition

The Sabres of Paradise

A stunning tale set in England, Paris, and Moscow, chronicling Blanch's love for an older Russian man and the passionate obsession that takes her to Siberia and beyond. “My book is not altogether autobiography, nor altogether travel or history either. You will just have to invent a new category,” Lesley Blanch wrote about Journey into the Mind’s Eye, a book that remains as singularly adventurous and intoxicating now as when it first came out in 1968. Russia seized Lesley Blanch when she was still a child. A mysterious traveler—swathed in Siberian furs, bearing Fabergé eggs and icons as gifts along with Russian fairy tales and fairy tales of Russia—came to visit her parents and left her starry-eyed. Years later the same man returned to sweep her off her feet. Her love affair with the Traveller, as she calls him, transformed her life and fueled an abiding fascination with Russia and Russian culture, one that would lead her to dingy apartments reeking of cabbage soup and piroshki on the outskirts of Paris in the 1960s, and to Siberia and beyond.

Fragments of an Autobiography

Journey Into the Mind's Eye

Journey into the Mind's Eye

The Exotic True-Life Stories of Isabel Burton, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, Jane Digby, and Isabelle Eberhardt

The Wilder Shores of Love

Croquis d'une vie de bohème

Originally published in 1954, The Wilder Shores of Love is the classic biography of four nineteenth-century European women who leave behind the industrialized west for Arabia in search of romance and fulfillment. Hailed by The Daily Telegraph as "enthralling to read," Lesley Blanch’s first book tells the story of Isabel Burton, the wife and traveling companion of the explorer Richard Burton; Jane Digby, who exchanged European society for an adventure in loving; Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, a Frenchwoman captured by pirates who became a member of the Turkish sultan’s harem; and Isabelle Eberhardt, a Swiss woman who dressed as a man and lived among the Arabs of Algeria.

Harriette Wilson

Nineteenth century London produced a fine flowering of eccentrics and individualists. Chief among them was Harriette Wilson, whose patrons included most of the distinguished men of the day, from the Duke of Wellington to Lord Byron. She held court in a box at the opera, attended by statesmen, poets, national heroes, aristocrats, members of the beau monde, and students who hoped to be immortalised by her glance.She wrote these memoirs in middle age, when she had fallen out of favour. She advised her former lovers that for GBP200 she would edit them out. 'Publish and be damned!' retorted the Duke of Wellington.The result is an elegant, zestful, unrepentant memoir, which offers intimately detailed portraits of the Regency demimonde.

Harriette Wilson's Memoirs

A grand tour for the taste buds—a delightful classic cookbook of the postwar era from a well-traveled woman. This charming little book was first published in 1956, when people in England were still enduring postwar restrictions on both traveling and eating. In the words of its author, Lesley Blanch, “benign fate whisked me elsewhere to follow less restricted ways, travelling widely and eating wildly.” Her gastronomic world tour includes eighty recipes, each prefaced by an account of where they were first tasted or with some amusing anecdote. You’ll find delicious dishes from her journeys around Europe and to the Middle East and Far East, Africa, the Pacific, Central and South America, and even a good old Baked Virginia Ham from the USA.

Round the World in Eighty Dishes

Georgia de Chamberet

Most famous for The Wilder Shores of Love, her book about four women travellers, Lesley Blanch was a scholarly romantic and a bold writer. Her lifelong passion was for Russia, the Balkans and the Middle East. At heart a nomad, she spent the greater part of her life travelling the remote areas her books record so vividly. Edited by her goddaughter Georgia de Chamberet, who was working with her in her centenary year, this book collects together the story of Blanch's marriage, previously published only in French; a selection of her journalism which brings to life the artistic melting pot that was London between the wars; and a selection of her most evocative travel pieces. Illustrated with photos alongside a selection of line drawings by Lesley Blanch

A Bohemian Life

On the Wilder Shores of Love

The classic story of four nineteenth-century women who, for different reasons, gravitated to the wildness of the Middle East and North Africa. "There have been many women who have followed the beckoning Eastern star" says Lesley Blanch. She writes about four such women in The Wilder Shores Of Love - Isabel Burton (who married the Arabist and explorer Richard), Jane Digby el-Mezrab (Lady Ellenborough, the society beauty who ended up living in the Syrian desert with a Bedouin chieftain), Aimée Dubucq de Rivery (a French convent girl captured by pirates and sent to the Sultan's harem in Istanbul), and Isabelle Eberhardt (a Swiss linguist who felt most comfortable in boy's clothes and lived among the Arabs in the Sahara). They all escaped from the constraints of nineteenth century Europe and fled to the Middle East, where they found love, fulfillment, and "glowing horizons of emotion and daring". Blanch's first, bestselling book, The Wilder Shores Of Love pioneered a new kind of group biography focusing on women escaping the boredom of convention. Yet although of widely different natures, backgrounds and origins, all had this in common - each found, in the East, 'glowing horizons of emotion and daring'. And each of them, in their own way, used love as a means of individual expression, of liberation and fulfilment.

The Four Walls of Love

Pavilions of the Heart

Lesley Blanch’s novella-length introduction to the Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, the reigning courtesan of Regency London, was first published in 1955 in New York, where she was then living with her diplomat-novelist husband, Romain Gary. The Wilder Shores of Love, for which Blanch is chiefly remembered, had been published to acclaim the previous year. Harriette Wilson lived among and was an integral part of a wealthy society where privilege, arrogance and leisure flourished. The greatest courtesan of her age, her patrons included many of the distinguished men of her day, from the Duke of Wellington to Lord Byron. Her weapons of allure were beauty, style and wit. She held court in a box at the opera and competed with her courtesan sisters for status and prestige. “Harriette Wilson’s life was deplorable – but how readable!” Blanch exclaims. The motive for writing the Memoirs, published in 1825, was blackmail, or “a desperate effort to live by my wits,” as Wilson put it. She was in her thirties, her looks were fading away as were her admirers, and the annuity she had been promised by the Duke of Beaufort in exchange for leaving alone his heir, the Marquis of Worcester, had been cut off. Wilson offered to edit out of her Memoirs any lovers who paid 200 pounds, thereby holding the British aristocracy to ransom. Certain men who bought her silence were excluded, while others who paid highly were hugely flattered. Those who were brave enough to stand up to her were ridiculed and shamed − most famously the Duke of Wellington: “Publish and be damned!” he cried. She did and she was. Regency England Undressed: Harriette Wilson, the Greatest Courtesan of her Age also offers intimately detailed portraits of eccentrics, individualists and the demi-monde. Blanch’s Biographical Notes in the Appendix read like a raffish Who's Who of Regency England, and Europe too. She brings the distant past to life so it reads like a novel; precise in its curious detail and bold in its historical panache. MAUREEN CLEAVE, DAILY TELEGRAPH — “A scholarly romantic in a school of her own, the depth of Lesley Blanch’s research is such that other writers plunder her books shamelessly.” LESLEY BLANCH "Today, in America, the courtesan may be said to have been replaced by the psychoanalyst. In place of the alcove there is the analyst's office. But basically the functions of both courtesan and analyst have the same principle. Both offer escape, relaxation and individual attention; both are expensive. And the couch is still there."

Harriette Wilson, the Greatest Courtesan of her Age

Regency England Undressed

﻿The definitive biography of the eccentric bisexual naval officer, traveller, amateur acrobat, and best-selling novelist who was given a state funeral in 1923, the only French writer to have received such an honour other than Victor Hugo. Pierre Loti (born Julien Viaud in 1850) was himself his own fictional creation and lived his picaresque fantasies instead of just imagining them. Everything he wrote, novels included, is partly autobiographical. He had a powerful influence on Marcel Proust and Henry James. Bohemian, exotic and fiercely romantic; adored and scorned by French society in equal measure, Loti spent his life escaping the constraints of bourgeois France — and in so doing redefined his age. He travelled the South Seas, Asia and the Middle East (his great obsession) and loved with intense passion and freedom wherever he went. One of the first foreign correspondents, Loti’s published work includes travel books and war reports from Indochina, Turkey, and China during the Boxer rebellion. Today, his house in Rochefort is a museum. One elaborately tiled room is a fantasia of a mosque. Another room evokes a medieval banqueting hall. NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS ― “Part Casanova, part René, and part Baron Müunchhausen [Loti got] out of scrapes and away with behaviour that would normally lead to disaster, disgrace, even death – as in the case of the Turkish lady whom he abducted from her husband’s harem night after night and sometimes for days on end. This adventure forms the subject of his anonymously published novel, Aziyadé (1877).”

Lesley Blanch

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