Volume 50, Number 9 · May 29, 2003
An Unsentimental Education
By Amos Elon
Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life
by Queen Noor
Miramax, 467 pp., $25.95
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, more than a few European women were either kidnapped by or enticed to marry exotic Ottoman potentates; some remained to spend their lives in royal harems. The legendary Lady Hester Stanhope roamed the Syrian highlands with her Bedouin lover. Lady Ellenborough, William Pitt's cousin, wife of the lord chancellor, ran off to marry an Arab sheik. The exploits of various such women were memorably described by Lesley Blanch in her portrait of romantically inclined, mostly upper-class English women who made their lives in North Africa and the Near East.[1]
Review, 4054 words
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