Lesley Blanch was born in London and has travelled over most of the globe. Her essays and articles have appeared in many of Britain's leading periodicals, including the Observer and the New Statesman. She now lives in France. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

For the four women included in this classic volume of biography, the wilder shores of love lay east of their native Europe—in Arabia, for Victorian Isabel Arundell, who married the defiantly unorthodox social outlaw and adventurer Burton of Arabia; in a harem, for Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, a convent girl abducted by Corsair pirates and presented to the ruler of the Ottoman Empire; in Bedouin tents and the bed of Sheik Abdul Madjuel El Mezrab for the raffish divorcee Jane Digby; and in the Sahara, for the Russian-born Isabelle Eberhardt, who entered the world of desert Arabs dressed as a man. “Love, wanderlust, faraway places—all that Romance implies—make up this delicious book.... Ideal reading.”—Washington Post Book World “A splendid quartet of biographies ... it is as engrossing a literary trip through the exotic East as I have taken.”—San Jose Mercury News “'A fabulous quartet' featuring four nineteenth-century women 'who out-dared the heroines of romance novels ... and swayed the course of empires.'”—New York Times Book Review