The Wilder Shores of Love

This book is several decades old now, so it has some real baggage to it. There’s the racial and cultural baggage of being an orientialist book about orientalists orientaliziing the orient. For one. Also, especially in the first section, there’s a heavy emphasis in old school notions of love and marriage and well plenty of it feels from a certain time and place. The book itself though is an incredibly interesting personal history of four otherwise not well known women who tore off for the near East for a differing set of reasons.

In part one, we meet Isabel Burton who in her youth read all about the exploits and adventures of Richard Burton, the incredibly famous warrior for hire, adventurer, linguist, archaeologist, and translator. So she decided to marry him. Their marriage together involved a kind dynamic we see a lot now with celeb married to a normie, with a heavy dose of codependency and compromise. They also spent incredibly long periods of time apart from one another too.

In part two, we meet Jane Digby, contemporary of the Burtons who kept restarting her life at various times and moving more and more toward the Near East in idea and proximity.

The last two sections blended more for me, and I was ready to be done. I still enjoyed the book, but there’s only so much of similar stories and unchecked….well, problematic ideas that you can take before you need a break. It’s an interesting book, but the stories both blend together a little and also don’t really hold up over time, in the manner they’re written about here.