Lesley Blanch – författare

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

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.

Lesley Blanch was four when the mysterious Traveller first blew into her nursery, swathed in Siberian furs and full of the fairytales of Russia. She was twenty when he swept out of her life, leaving her love-lorn and in the grips of a passionate obsession. The search to recapture the love of her life, and the Russia he had planted within her, takes her to Siberia and beyond, journeying deep into the romantic terrain of the mind's eye. Part travel book, part love story, Lesley Blanch's Journey into the Mind's Eye is pure intoxication.