Isabel Burton was the daughter of Hon. Henry Raymond Arundell (1799–1886) of
Isabel was one of eleven children born into
the House of Wardour, a respected and well-to-do Roman Catholic family in England London
During the Crimean War, Isabel was refused
three times in her quest to be a 'Nightingale nurse' and instead set up an
group of 150 like-minded women from Catholic families known as the Stella Club
to assist the wives and children of soldiers who had married without permission
and for whom the army took no responsibility. Such women and children were
often in dire circumstances at home. Isabel and her group went into the slums of
London
While on a school trip to Boulogne Burton
She was an intelligent, resourceful and
devout woman, but is always seen in the shadow of her husband, one of the most
famous of all Victorians. She was a strong supporter and advocate for her
husband and assisted him on many of his most significant writings. He has
credited her with being his most ardent supporter. He encouraged her to write
and she wrote a number of books, including among them a history of their
travels in Syria and Palestine Burton
She is perhaps best known for burning some
of his papers and manuscripts after his death, including his revised
translation of The Perfumed Garden, which was to be called The Scented Garden,
and of which the largest part consisted of the usually unpublished final
chapter dealing with pederasty, plus Burton's extensive (and comprehensive)
notes on the subject.
In an appendix to her unfinished
autobiography, her posthumous collaborator William Henry Wilkins pointed out
that she had a first offer of £6,000 for the manuscript, and moreover that she
need never have disclosed her actions at all, or blamed them on her husband. He
further claimed that she acted from a sincere belief that "out of a
thousand men who read the work, 15 would read it in the scientific spirit in
which it was written, and the other 985 solely for filth's sake", and
feared that publication would blight, not her husband's worldly reputation –
for his interest in the subject was notorious – but, by tempting others to sin,
his prospects in the world to come.
From her home in Baker Street
By 1895, Isabel was having difficulty in
walking and, in the summer, a bout of influenza and a bad attack of abdominal
pain meant that she was unable to progress very far on her own autobiography.
So she contacted W.H. Wilkins and asked him to help her when she was able to
return to the project. Wilkins's book, The Romance of Isabel Burton, was
published in 1897.
In September 1895 Isabel moved to Eastbourne until the following March. She died in London
Her body and that of her husband lie in the
churchyard of St Mary Magdalen's Roman Catholic Church Mortlake in south west
London, in an elaborate tomb in the shape of a Bedouin tent which she designed.
The coffins of Sir Richard and Lady Burton can be seen through a window at the
rear of the tent, which can be accessed via a short fixed ladder. Next to the
lady chapel in the church there is a memorial stained-glass window to Sir
Richard, erected by Lady Isabel.
January 17, 1999
'A Wild, Roving, Vagabond Life'
That's
what Isabel Burton wanted, and Sir Richard gave it to her.
By JAMES R.
KINCAID / https://www.nytimes.com/books/99/01/17/reviews/990117.17kincait.html
Sir Richard Burton (1821-90) -- explorer,
scholar, ethnologist, linguist, translator, eroticist -- was, of all the
eminent Victorians, the one most gifted at attracting and keeping enemies. Not
just any enemies either: an alarming number of his particularly unbalanced
contemporaries took up as a duty the job of hating him, dedicating their lives
to getting him. His only major competitor in the odium limelight was his wife.
Isabel (who was 10 years younger and outlived him by 6 years), a practiced officious
meddler and irritant to the important during her husband's life, saved her best
shot for after his death: legend has it that she burned her husband's papers
(diaries, manuscripts) at his death in a frenzy of bluenosed righteousness and
then, worse, mounted a tireless but absurd defense of her literary and cultural
crime. As a result, Isabel magnetized the well-oiled detestation not only of
the poet Swinburne and a host of her contemporaries but of nearly every scholar
and certainly every biographer since. What a couple. Her husband seems to have
combined the least attractive traits of Mike Tyson, Oliver North and Larry
Flynt; she of Tipper Gore, Leona Helmsley and Tonya Harding. This, anyhow, is
the received view.
Until now. Mary S. Lovell, the author of
biographies of Jane Digby, Amelia Earhart and Beryl Markham, opens her book by
telling us that the one thing we all know about Isabel, that she was a literary
arsonist, is wrong. She started a fire, certainly, and some of Burton
There is much new material in ''A Rage to
Live,'' an extraordinary biography, and at least as much writing that is clever
and persuasive as there is special pleading, as much that is moving as is
silly. Trying to write the biographies of two people who lived much of their
lives before they were together and, after that, were very often not together
for long periods involves Lovell in a lot of straddling and even more wild
hopping back and forth: but let us turn now from the pleasant salons of London
to the dark jungles of Africa, from the tinkle of laughing voices to the roar
of panthers. Still, Lovell convinces me that we have made a set of serious
blunders in understanding Isabel, the marriage, Burton
It is not an easy job to suggest that any
two human beings are happy for any length of time, much less marshal evidence
that will persuade the jaded that the Burtons' life together was ''a mutual
joy,'' beneficial to both. Lovell shows that Isabel was, without doubt, a
powerful and courageous woman who could swim with the sharks and fence; act as
collaborator, editor and literary agent; ride and shoot and treat rattlesnake
bites; get herself and Burton presented to the Queen and asked to dine with the
Prime Minister; write and think. It is hardly to our credit that we have so
readily constructed Isabel as another of those shrews-married-to-genius:
ignorant, intolerant and -- oh, it's a shame he got married at all! Anyhow, now
we have little choice but to see that we were wrong altogether and that as a
consequence Isabel, her husband and the whole era are more complex and
sometimes lovelier than we supposed.
The main events of Burton Burton
What a very odd claim. It's hard to know
what would count for ''evidence'' with someone confident she has scoured the
past; and she will not listen to anyone pointing to Burton's obsessive writings
on homosexuality and on pederasty, his comments on the pretty-boy ''blue eyes
and blond hair'' and ''childlike simplicity'' of John Hanning Speke, the
explorer of Africa, or Burton's rushing about Africa measuring men's penises.
Nonsense! Lovell snorts; Burton
However, the material on Burton Burton
He was astonishingly gifted and did not put
a bushel over those shining gifts: ''It is not my fault,'' he wrote in one of
his prefaces, ''if I am better educated than my fellows.'' Doubtless not, but
it's not the sort of approach calculated to win our hearts. He struck (and
that's the right word) his contemporaries as violence about to happen: as a
youth, he ran his fencing foil through the back of his brother's mouth and bashed
his violin over his music master's head. He so hated the idea of entering the
church that he got himself rusticated from Oxford
He knew about 30 languages and innumerable
difficult dialects, and his ethnological, linguistic and geographical work was
tireless and brilliant. He published nearly 40 volumes on his explorations
alone, along with grammars and volumes of folklore; he produced unexpurgated
translations of Eastern erotica: ''The Arabian Nights,'' ''The Kama Sutra'' and
''The Perfumed Garden of the Cheikh Nefzaoui,'' thus charting a collision
course with the National Vigilance Society and the Society for the Suppression
of Vice. He seems to have lived every minute restlessly and with unrelaxed
pugnacity, on the watch for something new to learn and somebody new to offend.
Lovell gives this part of her story a generous and uncluttered airing.
But it is with Isabel, the woman who became
at least as unpopular as her husband, that Lovell is most eloquent and
persuasive. She has indeed unearthed new material, and she uses it to build a
new Isabel, one who is as resolutely tactless as her husband but also as
courageous, defiant and smart. This new Isabel will not strike many as
down-home likable, but I do not see how anyone can now judge her easily or
harshly. Lovell finds her admirable, and so do I: she faced arduous challenges
and even harder decisions, and she charged into them with the extraordinary
gumption of a woman who knew how to bully and how to be loyal. Isabel knew from
the start that she was destined to marry Burton Burton
Isabel was, for all her tough-minded
independence, somewhat wackily superstitious, and not just when it came to
Gypsy queens. She loved to be hypnotized, insisted that Richard could call to
her from across great distances, felt herself to be both psychic and
clairvoyant, and held fast to dreams and omens. She was, in this light, someone
''who had strayed from the Middle Ages,'' as her husband affectionately put it.
Her premarital musings about Burton Burton Burton
Lovell is perhaps overenthusiastic in
assuring us that all parts of this marriage, including the sexual part, were
terrific. Just because they shared an ''intimate dialogue'' and Burton
More important, Lovell's new material shows
that without question Isabel worked closely with Burton
Lovell writes with a zeal that seems to
ring right out of Isabel herself. This biography is both admirably scholarly
and, now and then, engagingly reckless. Lovell has transformed our view of the Burtons
This doting zeal can lead Lovell often to
become zanily defensive. She notes that Burton Burton 11 stones
(154 lbs .)
she was hardly seriously overweight for her height.''
Such obsessions now and then detract Lovell
from telling us what we need to know: Burton Andes ;
Oscar Wilde was not convicted under the Obscene Publications Act.
But even the errors are amiable, as is
Lovell's identification with Isabel's grief. She enters into Isabel's designs
for Richard's tomb, a tentlike mausoleum, equipped with ''festoons of camel
bells'' to provide the sort of ''tinkling,'' she said, that would make it seem
just like the desert. Grieving widows cannot be criticized on matters of taste,
but Lovell probably didn't have to entitle her penultimate chapter ''Last
Tinkle of the Camel Bell'' or report on Isabel's own funeral quite so
evocatively: ''Above the voices of the priest and the choir . . . strings of
camel bells tinkled gaily in the brisk spring breeze.'' I find myself admiring
Isabel almost as much as I admire Lovell; but I wouldn't want either of them in
charge of my funeral arrangements. I have just told Mrs. K.: no camel bells.
James R. Kincaid, the Aerol Arnold
Professor of English at the University
of Southern California
