Wilder Love: Second Chance Standalone Romance (Love and Chaos)

Product Information

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. Wilder became a counsellor for Radner as he was twice-divorced and had plenty of advice to depart on the actress who was 13 years his junior.

Aimée Dubucq de Rivery: A very innocent young girl returning from a convent school in Nantes to her home in Martinique, was captured by corsairs and ended up in Constantinople as a gift to the Caliph of the Faithful, Padishar of the Barbary States, Shadow of the Prophet upon Earth, the Sultan Abul l Hamid I – Aimée’s fate.Richard and Isabel Burton: This was the chapter that I most looked forward to, having had a fascination with especially Richard Burton for a long while, because of his translation of One Thousand and One Nights. Their chapter lived up to my expectations. One of these days I'm going to read a full length biography on them both. Isabelle Eberhardt: She dressed up as a man in the Arab desert, so I knew I was in for a great journey. I liked her story a lot. A true rebel. Her horoscope at the end was a nice touch. The third study goes inside the seraglio where Aimee Dubucq De Rivery, cousin of Josephine of Napoleonic fame, was spirited when her ship was taken over. She learned much of politics from the inside machinations among the women and their respective sons in line for the rule as Sultan, and seems to have had quite an influence on middle-eastern foreign affairs through her connections before her son became a reformer during his reign. I read this quite a few years ago - can't think how I missed adding it here. Its biggest flaw, in my opinion, was that a good bit of it was speculative. Blanch found 4 women whose stories she thought were really cool - but there wasn't (apparently, for her) enough material on them to give each her own book, or even write a whole lot about what they actually did. Instead, Blanch spends a lot of time talking about what things "must" have felt or been like for these women. This is especially true about Dubucq de Rivery.

Known as the two funniest actors of 20th century Hollywood, fans were delighted when Radner and Wilder announced their relationship. Lesley Blanch takes for her subjects four well-bred European women who discovered that their “destiny” lay in the Middle East. First is Isabel Burton, a devout Catholic girl who fell madly in love with Richard Burton, the dashing explorer and Orientalist. Posterity has reviled Isabel because she burned Richard’s notes and manuscripts after he died, but Blanch shows that she was more than just a prudish Victorian wife. The Haunted Honeymoon actress suffered two miscarriages and IVF also proved to be pointless as the star was told she was infertile. She was obviously a strong character as she made a very good marriage in the end, all within the confines of the seraglio. But what fascinated me was the hierarchy in the luxury of the harem. The four favourite wives, and more so if they had a son, lived splendid rich lives with access outside their gilded cages. The Willy Wonka actor reportedly avoided Radner’s earliest advances out of respect for her husband, and she began to confide in him about her unhappy marriage.

We can agree about the “twentieth century disintegration”, that’s probably true enough. After about 1750, for some complicated reason, women’s choices as to how to live as individual humans in their own right became increasingly limited, so that by the later nineteenth they were down to about two – ministering angels or whores, for the most part an unbridgeable division. Twentieth century ‘feminism’ was mostly about breaking these stereotypes, never entirely successful and since arguably even less so. But in a way the geographical factor is incidental, unless it represents warmth and the need for less, or less restrictive, clothing, in itself suggestive to the Northern imagination of sensuality and ‘freedom’ though in fact as many or more social restrictions operate in the East as in the West and the Eastern countries have now become a target, accurately or otherwise, for those Western women worried about the ‘oppression’ of their oriental sisters. And as to the last sentence, that’s largely incomprehensible to the average man, for whom “love” is just another adventure amongst many other possibilities. To the male characters in this book it meant nothing much at all. Of course they loved the women they were involved with, but in a different way; it was not the be-all-end-all of their existences, it was not “a means of individual expression, liberation and fulfilment. That came from other wider and more diverse sources, and here we meet the eternal predicament known as the battle of the sexes, most strikingly represented in the first and longest in this collection of biographical essays. Finally the very brief but intense life of Isabelle Eberhardt, born in Switzerland but with multiple languages and streams of cultural influence throughout Europe, despite her desperate desire to be in the desert. Living one of those lives that seems to race itself to its own finishing line, as if all along knowing it did not have the time others would have to fully form and express itself, it all came in a rush and proved its own demise by its awareness of living on that most challenging of lines, always conscious of death. I don’t write fiction because I can’t invent. For biography I have to remember, and then work round a character. In biography you don’t invent anything, but you interpret. However, that doesn’t mean that you don’t use your imagination." At 15, I was enthralled by the dashing adventures of these four Victorian women who defied the boredom of their culturally prescribed lives to escape to the Middle East. The book is exciting and conversational enough to entice a surly teenager into loving it, even one who would rather have been dancing in discos than digging in deserts. Isabelle even cross-dressed in England and in the Sahara, a fact which moved me.

Use italics (lyric) and bold (lyric) to distinguish between different vocalists in the same song part

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 her memoir, Radner declared: “Now I had Epstein-Barr virus and mittelschmerz. Fitting diseases for the Queen of Neurosis.” Four short biographies of Victorian-age women (not all British) who looked to the exotic East for adventure and romance, and found it at some great personal cost. In May 1989 Radner was taken to a CAT scan and fought the sedation as she was terrified she would not wake up again. A friend described the couple as “constant honeymooners” five years after their wedding but no one knew the troubles that awaited.

She had once been told by a gypsy called Hagar Burton that she would meet a man with the same surname. So destiny began working. However, It took ten years for Isabel to marry Burton as her parents were against him but in the end it all worked and she lived a wonderful but very demanding life.

Believe it or not, I decided to read The Wilder Shores of Love because it got quoted in the J. Peterman catalogue next to an illustration of a fancy nightgown. And after reading the book, that doesn’t seem like a bad place for it. Like the J. Peterman catalogue, it is fanciful, romantic, ardent, and full of exoticism. It is seductive yet also a guilty pleasure, due to the way it traffics in outdated stereotypes about ethnicity and gender. Recommendation: Unless you’re a total Lawrence of Arabia / French Foreign Legion fan, you might want to pass on this one. During the filming of Hanky Panky the pair remained friends, but when Radner officially divorced her husband in 1982 they instantly reconnected and became inseparable. Let me borrow from goodreader, Elizabeth’s October, 2012 review of this book in which she wrote, “I really enjoy stories about strong, independent and adventurous women!” So do I. Physicians immediately enrolled the actress in chemotherapy but her treatments were often bombarded by reporters looking for information on her condition and to speak to her husband.