The wilder shores of love

"The four women who form the subject of this book belonged to the West ... Each found, in the East, glowing horizons of emotion and daring."

Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, a convent girl captured by corsairs and sold into the Harem of the Grand Turk; Lady Ellenborough, a society beauty who fled London for Athens, and Athens for the Syrian tent of Sheikh Medjuel El Bezrab; Isabel Burton, whose explorer husband's love for the East became her passion; and Isabelle Eberhardt, transvestite and linguist, whose love affair with the East ended when she drowned in the desert sand at the age of twenty-seven...