A Scandalous Life
The Biography of Jane Digby
MARY S. LOVELL
This book is dedicated to
Joan Williams
to whom I owe a great deal;
she knows why.
And also to my aunt
Winifred Wooley
who is a great lady.
‘How could this Lady Ellenborough, whose scandalous life is known to all the world, have deceived you, Your Majesty?’
Letter to King Ludwig I from his mistress’s maid
Contents
4 A Dangerous Attraction 1827–1829
5 Assignation in Brighton 1829–1830
9 A Duel for the Baroness 1836–1840
11 The Queen’s Rival 1846–1852
14 Honeymoon in Palmyra 1854–1855
15 Wife to the Sheikh 1855–1856
16 Return to England 1856–1858
19 Visitors from England 1862–1863
20 The Sitt el Mezrab 1863–1867
21 Challenge by Ouadjid 1867–1869
23 Untimely Obituary 1871–1878
Appendix: Last Will and Testament of the Hon. Jane Digby
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