Old books

I was lucky enough to find this old book on the second-hand bookbarrow at Little River railway station.
The title sounds like the worst kind of bodice-ripper, but it's a fascinating account of four women who travelled to the East and fell in love with it. I had read of Isabel Burton before and her obsessive love for her complex, difficult and remarkable husband, but the other three women, Jane Digby El-Mezrab, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery and Isabelle Eberhardt, no.
Aimee Dubucq de Rivery's story is the most riveting. A Creole girl from Martinique, she was Josephine Bonaparte's cousin and was brought up with her. Sent for some years to a convent in Nante for her education, she was kidnapped by Barbary Corsairs on her return home. Ironically, her beauty saved her virtue: the pirate captain realised that she was a special prize, and she was eventually sent as a gift to the Sultan of Constantinople by the King of Morocco. Entering the harem, never to be seen again by her family, she became the youngest wife of the Sultan, and mother of his heir, Mahmoud. Thus the Ottoman Empire became a little more open to the West, and a little less insular in its dealings with Europe.
And proof that fact is stranger and far more interesting than fiction.