Lady Hester Stanhope: The Unconventional Life of the 'Queen of the Desert' by Joan Haslip

Lady Hester Stanhope: The Unconventional Life of the 'Queen of the Desert' Reviews

• 
  Lucy Cummin

  I've been dragging through this dreary biography for what feels like an eternity (rather than quitting) for a few reasons 1) I engaged to read this with several friends here on LT but bought the wrong biography 2) Lady Hester Stanhope was a truly fascinating woman of the Regency era, Pitt's niece, and 3) I'm a completist, darn it all. In brief LHS left England after Pitt died. She had served as his hostess when he was PM and had adored him. She ended up in the Middle East, partly by design, partly by happenstance (like a shipwreck) and never left. There she indulged her eccentricities, as Haslip puts it, and over time besides becoming utterly indigent by generous overspending became more and more isolated in her mountaintop home, Djoun.
  
  I researched a little and the consensus is the Haslip, while dated and while not providing notes or a bibliography, does state the facts and details accurately. However, her theories, judgements and conclusions about the whys and wherefors of LHS's behaviours and choices are hopelessly dated and are also totally inconsistent. Was LHS mad or was she not? Was she a kind and thoughtful person or wickedly cruel? Haslip doesn't have, for example, the psychological tools to examine LHS's behaviour from a more compassionate stance other than that she was an undisciplined and arrogant aristocrat who operated on whims and impulse, uneducated and brilliant. All true, but there is no depth in that evaluation. And her sex life! Who knows? Haslip is fabulously unclear. The original was written in 1926 and, for reasons I cannot fathom, republished in 2006. Anyway, my advice is, if you are interested in LHS and you should be! don't read this bio, find a better one! **
• 
  Amy Varner

  Not an easy to read biography...hard to follow and no source documentation.