Lesley Blanch, MBE, FRSL (June 6, 1904, London – May 7, 2007, Garavan, near Menton, France [1]) was an English writer, fashion editor and writer of history.
A scholarly romantic, Blanch attended St. Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith. She would spend the greater part of her long life travelling about those remote regions her books record so vividly. Her lifelong passion was for Russia and the Middle East. She was, in the words of the historian Philip Mansel, “not a school, a trend, or a fashion, but a true original.”
Blanch studied painting at the Slade and went on to do private commissions, portraits and book jackets for T. S. Eliot at Faber amongst others. She soon turned to journalism, and was features editor of British Vogue from 1937-44. She covered various aspects of Britain at war for the Ministry of Information, and documented the lives of women in the forces with her friend the photographer Lee Miller. She married Robert Alan Wimberley Bicknell in 1930 and they were divorced in 1941, although the marriage had long since ceased. She claimed, according to an interview in The Sunday Times in August 2006, that she had married Bicknell in order to obtain a house in Richmond, near the Thames in London.
In 1945, she married the French novelist-diplomat Romain Gary. Life in the French diplomatic service took them to the Balkans, Turkey, North Africa, Mexico and the USA. In the USA they associated with Hollywood stars such as Gary Cooper, Aldous Huxley, Sophia Loren and Laurence Olivier.[2]
Gary left her for American actress Jean Seberg[2] and they divorced in 1962. Blanch continued to travel from her Paris base, and saw old friends Nancy Mitford, Violet Trefusis, Rebecca West and the Windsors. She was a close friend of Gerald de Gaury, who gave her insights into middle eastern customs and culture.[3]
The best known of her 12 books is The Wilder Shores of Love, about four women who "followed the beckoning Eastern star.” It pioneered a new kind of group biography focusing on "women escaping the boredom of convention," and the title added a phrase to the English language. Blanch's love of Russia, instilled in her as a child by a friend of her parents whom she simply called The Traveller, is recounted in Journey into the Mind's Eye, Fragments of an Autobiography which is part travel book, part love story. Lesley Blanch considered her best book to be The Sabres Of Paradise (the biography of Imam Shamyl and history of Imperialist Russian rule in early 19th century Georgia and the Caucasus).
Contents |
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Lesley Blanch was appointed MBE in 2001, and in 2004 the French government awarded her the medal of Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
She celebrated her 100th birthday in 2004. She died just one month shy of 103.[4]