In her memoir, Radner declared: “Now I had Epstein-Barr virus and mittelschmerz. Fitting diseases for the Queen of Neurosis.” Eventually the couple used pseudonyms, Lorna and Stanley Blake, to avoid the press and nurtured their adorable relationship throughout the treatment.

Admittedly, Arabian nights and Turkish delights have never held much excitement for my fancy, so the setting of Lesley Blanch’s four-woman, biographical vignettes, THE WILDER SHORES OF LOVE, combined with her stilted, formal, presentation, may have been a part of the reasons I found it rather uninteresting. Aimée du Buc de Rivéry: One of my favourite chapters in the book. We know that she disappeared at sea, but there is a prevailing legend that she was captured at sea, and that she supposedly spent the rest of her life in the harem of the Ottoman Empire. According to current historians, it's not been substantiated whether or not those two women are one and the same. Regardless, Lesley Blanch tells you this legendary story most engagingly. As her symptoms worsened she was diagnosed with Epstein-Barr virus, a common illness that causes fatigue. 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.The New York Times noted later that year: “All of Mr Wilder’s future plans appear to include Miss Radner.” There are, undoubtedly, books more boring to read than this one; but my hope is that neither of us will ever have to read any of them. 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. 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. The shape of this book, in effect, laps the stories over each other like waves of influence that ebb and flow. Most fitting then to end with young Isabelle’s death by drowning in the desert she so loved. I am not sure how much of her work has been translated into English, as most of what was published during and after her lifetime was in French, but I am most curious to read her directly if I can. If it means polishing up on my French to do so effectively I will. But hopefully I can find more in English to prepare the way, as her interests in mysticism most closely sit with my own explorations throughout my own life, making her tale more poignant to me than the earlier lives.

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. He wrote: “In June we went to Paris, and I took her to my favourite bistro. After we ate, she started feeling uncomfortable, and the discomfort grew when we went outside walking on the street. Oscar Wilde love quote “You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.”

So secondly we learn a little more about Jane Digby El Mezrab, who was reasonably well-known to the Burton’s having married her last husband in Syria before the couple arrived together in Damascus. This life is a series of closely-linked monogamous relationships, some involving marriage, and children, but not necessarily all having either characteristic. This was a highly intelligent and educated woman who challenged herself beyond any perceived restrictions, and earned great respect among the people she eventually resided with in the desert. 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.

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. The Haunted Honeymoon actress suffered two miscarriages and IVF also proved to be pointless as the star was told she was infertile. 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. 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." This one took me a while to get through, mostly because I didn't take it away on a recent trip, but also it wasn't the most engaging read for me.

Jane Digby: What a fascinating woman! Not always a fan of her choices, though. She travelled a great deal throughout her life. One of the places she spent time in was Paris, where she met Balzac, who based one of his characters on her (Lady Arabelle Dudley in Le Lys dans la vallée). Her years in the Syrian desert as the wife of Sheik Abdul Madjuel El Mezrab was especially interesting to me. Overall, an incredibly eventful journey that I loved reading. In May 1989 Radner was taken to a CAT scan and fought the sedation as she was terrified she would not wake up again. While it seemed this was the end of her troubles, Radner’s legs started shaking uncontrollably, with severe fevers and bloating plaguing the actress around her menstrual cycle. 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.

Next we learn about Jane Digby, a beautiful aristocrat who had a string of scandalous romances that took her from England to France to Germany to Greece, and who finally found stability and contentment as the wife of a Bedouin tribesman. 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. Wilder assured her she would be okay and that he would be waiting for her after the scan, but she was tragically correct in her fears and didn’t wake up again before dying three days later at the age of 42. 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.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. 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. At the time, Radner was still married to her first husband G.E. Smith but Wilder had been mostly single since divorcing his second wife Mary Schutz in 1974. Oscar Wilde love quote “Men always want to be a woman’s first love – women like to be a man’s last romance.” Her god-daughter calls her “ a Sheherezade figure”. Blanch romanticises in vivid detail her girlhood in the years leading up to World War One. She had a baby by an Italian soldier, gave it up for adoption and never mentions it again. I couldn’t decide whether she was heartbroken or heartless. Her first teenage impression of Florence was that it was “ forbidding”; Venice was “ draughty”.