Lesley Blanch

Blanch continued to travel from her Paris base, and saw old friends Nancy Mitford, Violet Trefusis, Rebecca West and the Windsors. She was a close friend of Gerald de Gaury, who gave her insights into middle eastern customs and culture.

The best known of her 12 books is The Wilder Shores of Love, about four English women, Isabel Burton, Lady Jane Digby, Isabelle Eberhardt, and Aimée du Buc de Rivéry, a cousin of Josephine, who all "followed the beckoning Eastern star.” It pioneered a new kind of group biography focusing on "women escaping the boredom of convention," and the title added a memorable phrase to the English language. Blanch's love of Russia, instilled in her as a child by a friend of her parents whom she simply called The Traveller, is recounted in Journey into the Mind's Eye, Fragments of an Autobiography which is part travel book, part love story. Lesley Blanch considered her best book to be The Sabres Of Paradise (the biography of Imam Shamyl and history of Imperialist Russian rule in early 19th century Georgia and the Caucasus). Read Less