Book 17 – “The Wilder Shores of Love” by Lesley Branch

Lesley Branch wrote The Wilder Shores of Love in the 1950s and some of the writing reflects that era. It’s a book telling the stories of four European women whom the author has picked because she feels that they sought adventure and love in the “East”. All the events happen during the nineteenth century or just after and the stories come from Syria, Algeria, Turkey and the Sahara area. The author finds these areas exotic, and occasionally erotic, and her language and choice of words reflect her feelings. The modern reader might present things in a different way and use different words to describe things.

The first woman featured in the book is Isabella Burton, the wife of the diplomat, writer and explorer Richard Burton (who does not appear to be a very nice man) whom she married at the end of his career but with whom she shared a love of the desert. Her story takes up about half the book and is a love story and also one of a woman who completely identified with her husband to such an extent that she destroyed many of his writings after his death because she didn’t want them to affect the reputation she felt that he deserved.

The second woman featured was a society beauty who was much married but eventually found happiness with a Bedouin chieftain living with his people. The final story is of a Swiss woman who dressed as a man and lived in and around the Sahara in a way that other European woman were unable to but who unfortunately was killed in an accident after only a few years of the freedom that she desired – her love was for the lifestyle rather than one particular man.

I found the story of the third woman more problematical. Aimee de Rivery was born and brought up in Martinique (she was a cousin of Napoleon’s love Josephine) and was captured by pirates in the Mediterranean and sent to the Sultan’s harem in Istanbul. Eventually her son became Sultan in his own right and the author feels that he was very much influenced by his mother although she provides no direct evidence of this. Most of this part of the book seemed to me to be conjecture and I can’t see why she thinks that Aimee lived any sort of life of love or had any freedom to choose at all.

In fact, most of the book contains a good deal of conjecture and romantic writing about the “mysterious” east in order to describe these as stories of love. In my view, these are the stories of three women who didn’t fit in European society and found a way to live outside it and one story of a captured woman who probably made the best of a difficult situation. Nevertheless, this is a highly entertaining book which features the stories of woman who may otherwise be forgotten. I found it very readable.