Lesley Blanch

Lesley Blanch, MBE, FRSL (6 June 1904 – 7 May 2007) was a British writer, historian and traveller. She is best known for The Wilder Shores of Love, about 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 du Buc de Rivéry (a French convent woman 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).

Quotes

• She was an Amazon. Her whole life was spent riding at breakneck speed towards the wilder shores of love.
  • The Wilder Shores of Love (1954), pt. 2, ch. 1