From the back cover of the book: The time was the nineteenth century and limpid-eyed musicians who poured out their impassioned souls across the gardens of Como to entrance an idle audience of lavender-laced ladies. The stylized legend of Victorian womanliness did not accommodate romance for ladies, and so it was that the "mysterious East" came to be a symbolic place where the promises of poetic dreams and exotic rhythms could be fulfilled.
This is the story of four women of different natures and backgrounds, but of similar spirit and vision, who actually went to the East to realize their dreams of romance and to gain liberation from the grayness of Europe. Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, a gentle convent girl who mothered a Sultan; Isabelle Eberhardt, the chaotic Slav, made the mistake of dressing like a man; Jane Digby, wealthy, raffish divorcee, smashed every convention of her society; and Isabel Burton, the plump wife of "Burton of Arabia", possessed the East through the man she loved.
This is the story of four women of different natures and backgrounds, but of similar spirit and vision, who actually went to the East to realize their dreams of romance and to gain liberation from the grayness of Europe. Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, a gentle convent girl who mothered a Sultan; Isabelle Eberhardt, the chaotic Slav, made the mistake of dressing like a man; Jane Digby, wealthy, raffish divorcee, smashed every convention of her society; and Isabel Burton, the plump wife of "Burton of Arabia", possessed the East through the man she loved.
