A Scandalous Life. Mary S. Lovell

Bibliography

       Index

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       Author’s Notes

       Notes

       Praise

       By Mary S. Lovell

Copyright

       About the Publisher

       Preface

      Friends often ask me how I choose my subjects. The answer is that my subjects usually choose me, and so it was with Jane Digby.

      This book began at a cocktail party at the RAF Club in London in the spring of 1992 when Jane Digby’s name and her story came up in conversation. I had never heard of her, so I made a mental note to do some research and rapidly found myself in the early stages of an obsession that was to last several years. Who was Jane Digby, and why should she cast such an appeal?

      Born into the English aristocracy with every conceivable advantage in physical beauty, social position and wealth, Jane spent the final years of her life married to a desert prince. The Palladian mansions and gilded Mayfair salons of her youth made way for low black goat-hair tents and rugs spread upon wind-washed sands. Even now, with jet travel and motorised transport, the Syrian desert is one of the few lonely places left on earth. What unlikely circumstance, I wondered, had led Jane Digby there a century and a half ago?

      Barely out of the schoolroom, already regarded as one of the most beautiful women of her day, Jane had married an ambitious politician, Lord Ellenborough, who was twice her age. In achieving his desire for a Cabinet post, Ellenborough neglected his bride and she soon sought consolation elsewhere. Before she was twenty-one Jane’s love affair with an Austrian prince precipitated her into one of the most scandalous divorce cases of the nineteenth century. In April 1830, to the astonishment of its readers, The Times cleared its traditional front page of classified advertisements to carry a sensational news story – a verbatim report of the Ellenborough divorce hearing in Parliament which included intimate details about the beautiful peeress and her prince.

      Jane did not dispute the charges. Head over heels in love, she had already run off to Europe. But her story did not end there. Subsequently, for over twenty years Jane was to have a number of love affairs with members of the European aristocracy including a German baron, a Greek count and the King of Bavaria, as well as an Albanian general from the mountains. During this time she also married twice and travelled from the royal courts of Europe to the wilder regions of Turkey and the Orient. After a succession of scandals and betrayals, she made a journey to Syria. By then she was almost fifty and feared her life was over. Astonishingly, the most exciting part of her story still lay ahead of her.

      The Arab nobleman who had been engaged to escort her caravan to the ruined city of Palmyra fell in love with her. He was young enough to be her son, was of a different culture and already had a spouse; indeed, he had recently divorced a second wife but he asked Jane to marry him. Although she was doubtful at first, she was soon deeply in love and, ignoring the entreaties of British officials, placed herself willingly in the power of a man who could divorce his partners on a whim. Sheikh Medjuel el Mezrab was the love of her life, and he brought her all the romance and adventure she had ever dreamed of.

      Inevitably, because of the years she spent in Arabia, Jane’s story invites comparisons with that of Lady Hester Stanhope, the niece and confidante of William Pitt who became the self-styled ‘Queen of the Desert’ a generation before Jane. But Hester Stanhope ended her life in Syria in abject poverty as an eccentric recluse, robbed, abused and eventually deserted by her Arab servants. Jane Digby lived as a respected, working leader of her adopted tribe, spending months at a time in the Baghdad desert, sharing the spare existence of the bedouin.

      So astonishing was Jane Digby’s career to her contemporaries that no fewer than eight novels based on her character and various elements of her story were written during her lifetime – one for every decade of her life. From 1830 until her death in Damascus in 1881 her name was rarely out of the newspapers as she featured in one outrageous tale after another.

      Was it possible, I wondered when I embarked upon this project, to discover the rationale of such a person who even as a young woman married to an eminent Cabinet Minister refused to concede to convention by hiding her illicit love affair? Who a century ahead of her time was completely free of any form of racial or cultural prejudice? Who saw travel to exotic destinations as a raison d’être second only to sharing her life with a great all-encompassing love (though she showed remarkably little regard for the immense difficulties involved in both)? Who had, even prior to her desert expeditions, carelessly abandoned the comfortable life of a royal mistress to live with an Albanian chieftain who was virtually a legitimised brigand?

      Over a hundred years had elapsed since her death, but I knew that, in common with many contemporaries, Jane kept diaries all her life. Her first biographer, E. M. Oddie, who wrote A Portrait of Ianthe in 1935, had access to some of them; but several subsequent biographers (such as Lesley Blanch and Margaret Schmidt) declared that the diaries were lost. Since E. M. Oddie had quoted from the diaries hardly at all, this seemed especially tragic. So I set out to discover what had happened to them in order to learn about Jane through her own voice. I also decided to try to locate the diaries and correspondence of people who met or were friends with Jane, not only to see what more could be learned about her, but to give a three-dimensional perspective to her story.

      I contacted Lord Digby, a direct descendant of Jane’s brother, Edward, and in April 1993 at his invitation I drove down to Minterne House in Dorset one morning to see his collection of Jane’s watercolours. Over lunch I told him about my work and, after a pause, he looked at me, seemed to come to a decision, and said, ‘Um, we do have Jane’s diaries here. But we’ve never shown them to anyone.’

      Within a short time I was seated at a writing table with objects that had once been Jane’s; her notebooks and sketchbooks, and her diaries which covered more than three decades, principally those years she spent in the desert. All would need to be transcribed and indexed to be easily accessible. Some sections written in pencil were badly faded; many entries were written in code and there were passages written in French and Arabic. I realised too that the code, once broken, might translate into any of the many languages that Jane spoke; it would be a mammoth task. Five days later I was due to leave for Syria to research Jane’s life there. I asked to be allowed to return to Minterne at some date in the future for a very long time.

      Somewhere there must be a patron saint of biographers, to whom I owe much. On my second visit Lord Digby showed me a small portrait of Jane which hangs in the great hall at Minterne. ‘We believe from portraits that she had the same colouring as my sister Pamela … we’ve always thought they were probably quite alike.’ The Hon. Pamela Digby, later Mrs Randolph Churchill and now US Ambassador Mrs Averell Harriman, shares a great deal with Jane: intelligence and charm, an unselfconscious sexuality, a disregard of the mores that accept (even admire) polygamy in men but deprecate similar behaviour in women. Mrs Harriman is widely regarded as a nonpareil among US Ambassadors to France and her ability to attract and fascinate is as legendary as that of her ancestor. Several portraits of Jane bear a remarkable likeness to Pamela Digby Harriman.

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