'The Wilder Shores of Love' focuses on four variations on the theme of the 19th century woman who turns to the East for her adventurous life and love.

Lesley Blanch here takes the reader on a uniquely romantic journey to the settings caves, convents, harems and villas - where lovers have come together for a moment, a night or a lifetime. Her subjects are chosen carefully from those places in her travels where she has come upon a story that has fired the imagination. Some of the stories are of great and famous love affairs, others largely unknown - though no less intriguing. Blanch writes of Nelson and Lady Hamilton's scandalous affair in a suburban house in London; Pushkin and Countess Woronzov's trysts in a cave beside the Black Sea;...

JOHN BARKHAM, NEW YORK WORLD A delicious tale of low behaviour in high places; with particular attention to the activities of an irresistible and gifted East Indian Prince who takes his own form of revenge against the entire English Empire by inducting a bevy of highborn English females into the fine points of Oriental eroticism, proving that Debrett's Peerage is no match at all for the Karma Sutra . . . TIME Wildly funny. The Rao divided women into two categories: those with bodies and those with jewels . . . When East meet West: in this witty satirical romance, Lesley Blanch recreates the...

Lesley Blanch's novella-length introduction to the Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, the reigning courtesan of Regency London, was first published in 1955 in New York, where she was then living with her diplomat-novelist husband, Romain Gary. The Wilder Shores of Love, for which Blanch is chiefly remembered, had been published to acclaim the previous year. Harriette Wilson lived among and was an integral part of a wealthy society where privilege, arrogance and leisure flourished. The greatest courtesan of her age, her patrons included many of the distinguished men of her day, from the Duke of...