Wilder Love: Second Chance Standalone Romance (Love and Chaos)

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As a biography, it was written far too subjectively to be very good. The author made too many conjectures about her subjects' motives and about the states of their minds without very strong supporting evidence. Oscar Wilde’s words on love are a keen observer of our human condition with insights that pave open the gates to edens multi faceted paths. Savvy, self-possessed and talented, Blanch did what she wanted and earned a good living at a time when women were expected to stay at home and be subservient to the needs of husband and children. She was glamorous and stylish and, in her own unique way, distinctly powerful.

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. Around the same time, the actress began feeling off, struggling to stay awake during work and social engagements and often felt faint. I gave this book only three stars because the writing was overdone, especially on the first two biographies. Perhaps it is just my impatience with the subjects or my impatience with the writing, but at times I found the book tedious. But I must credit these four women for striking out and making their own way at a time when that was very difficult. 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. About the Harem, the innermost women’s quarters of the Seraglio, Mme Blanch can say little since few if any Westerners ever entered one. Apparently, though, contrary to the image in torrid imaginations, strict discipline and formality prevailed, almost like a nunnery, because it was the women who actually held the power behind the throne, vied for their lord’s notice with fierce rivalry between them to place an heir on the throne. With native shrewdness Mlle de Rivery (now known as Naksh, The Beautiful One), learned fast, cultivating those she judged to be influential. Sultan Abd ul Hamid’s nephew Selim, a rather delicate young man with ‘progressive’ ideas, was his recognised heir; his First Wife, not progressive at all and relying on the support of the terrifying Janisseries, had every intention of advancing her own son at any price, and two ferocious factions had developed within the palace. The Beautiful One, having been expertly trained in the “arts of love”, and to the other’s fury, rapidly usurped her and had a son of her own who was the apple of his father’s eye. Half French and carefully and continuously watched over and guarded by his mother and with an education that was only half Turkish, the boy – having murdered his rival - survived to adulthood to become until 1839 Sultan Mahmud II of Turkey.

Oscar Wilde love quote “Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.”

Isabel Arundell (later Burton): A determined woman, had a desire to go to the East, and as soon as she met Richard Burton, “with his dark Arabic face, his ‘questing panther eyes’, he was for her that lodestar East, the embodiment of all her longings. Man and land were identified.” 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. 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. The New York Times noted later that year: “All of Mr Wilder’s future plans appear to include Miss Radner.”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. A friend described the couple as “constant honeymooners” five years after their wedding but no one knew the troubles that awaited. 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. Doctors believed the symptoms were partly connected to her depression as they could not find anything wrong with her stomach.