Adventurer author, Lesley Blanch, R.I.P.

From the New York Times obituary page:

Lesley Blanch, an English writer and traveler best known for “The Wilder Shores of Love,” a biography of four 19th-century women who cast aside convention to seek adventure and romance in the East, died on Monday in Menton, in the South of France. She was 102 and had lived in Menton for many years.

The Times writes:

Published in 1954, “The Wilder Shores of Love” (Simon & Schuster) was Ms. Blanch’s first book. It told the stories of Isabel Burton, the wife and sometime traveling companion of the explorer Richard Burton; Jane Digby, the multiple-married beauty who forsook European society to become the wife of a Bedouin chieftain; Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, a Frenchwoman who was captured by pirates and became a member of the Turkish sultan’s harem; and Isabelle Eberhardt, a Swiss woman who dressed as a man and lived among the Arabs of Algeria.

As the Times continues:

As obsessed with the East as the women she wrote about had been, Ms. Blanch spent decades traveling throughout the Soviet Union, Central Asia and the Middle East.

. . . The primary difference between Ms. Blanch and her subjects was this: Because she had the luck to have been born in the 20th century — though only just — she could do the same things they did with less chance of causing a scandal. It is not certain, however, that a scandal would have troubled Ms. Blanch much.

. . .“Did I have adventures with foreign men?” Ms. Blanch said in an interview with The Times of London on the occasion of her 100th birthday. “I did many times because I like them.”

In this same interview she also, as the Times put it, "described the two forces that had spurred her ceaseless wanderings":

“I wanted to be moving towards color” was the first.

The second was her persistent longing to return to a simpler, bygone life. As she explained, “I despise all I see of progress, except anesthetics.”