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When her mother, the wife of a Russian general, decided to move to Bône in Algeria, Isabelle threw herself into her Arabic, which soon became fluent and she very quickly appeared to be more of an Arab than the Arabs themselves.
The book finishes with the brief, febrile life of Isabelle Eberhardt, a Russian-Swiss woman who roamed around Algeria dressed as a man, taking many lovers and trying to become a Sufi mystic. Wilder became a counsellor for Radner as he was twice-divorced and had plenty of advice to depart on the actress who was 13 years his junior.The poem itself is rather sad and completely devoid of the lightness and cynical acidity of Wilde’s general quotes about love and marriage.
Burton insisted, rightly, that he was no pornographer but a serious scholar who happened to be recording things that were not spoken of, or even remotely imagined, in the West, noting with cynical amusement: “I have struggled for forty-seven years, distinguished myself honourably in every way that I could.I think the desire in us to know and be known is so great that it speaks to what I believe is the transcendent part of a person.
Every so often, Blanch lapses into untranslated French and frequently makes obscure Classic/Euro-centric references, making me feel like a Total Cultural Illiterate, as opposed to the Partial Cultural Illiterate that I am. Loved the old fashioned English style peppered with French; except last biography due to a very abrupt change in writing.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). Isabel Arundell (later Burton): A determined woman, had a desire to go to the East, and as soon as she met Richard Burton, “with his dark Arabic face, his ‘questing panther eyes’, he was for her that lodestar East, the embodiment of all her longings.
Burton’s sister was especially indignant over what she saw as misappropriation by a scheming Papist, though she may not have been too sorry about the destruction of the papers. Blanch tries to explain Eberhardt by frequent references to her “melancholy Russian soul,” but to a 21st-century reader, that just sounds silly and stereotypical. Most of these Oscar Wilde love quotes are very well-known and often quoted as amusing reflections on those states by lovers and married people about their own sitution. Then comes Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, a French girl who was shipwrecked, kidnapped by pirates, sold into the Ottoman Emperor’s harem, and eventually saw her son become Sultan. 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.
She was obviously a strong character as she made a very good marriage in the end, all within the confines of the seraglio. The Wilder Shores of Love was included in the dig shelves of Ross Macdonald mysteries and Angélique historical romances. It is seductive yet also a guilty pleasure, due to the way it traffics in outdated stereotypes about ethnicity and gender. I’ll possibly except Aimee Dubucq De Rivery—kidnapped by pirates at twenty-one and given, as a gift, into a Turkish harem, there to rise to Sultana—in this instance.
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