The Wilder Shores of Love
Lesley Blanch
This book is a compilation of four mini-bios of women who lived from the 18th Century to the very early 20th Century. The thread that weaves these women's stories together is that their hearts and lives were inexorably bound to the Near East, and all bucked convention in one way or another.
As a biography, it was written far too subjectively to be very good. The author made too many conjectures about her subjects' motives and about the states of their minds without very strong supporting evidence.
On the other hand, I loved this book, which read more like historical fiction, to me. I must admit, here, to a guilty-pleasure weakness for romantic exoticism, and this was thoroughly satisfying on that level. It's also always satisfying to read about and root for women who were strong enough to live lives outside the narrow confines of the role of women from earlier eras.
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