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.
One memorable day I received a package from a descendant of Jane’s brother Kenelm, a branch of whose family moved to New Zealand some decades ago. It contained letters written by Jane to her family and others over a thirty-year period. Together with her diaries and other papers, they provide a unique insight into a remarkable life.
During my trip to Syria I encountered the seductive spell of the desert that so bewitched Jane. With the enthusiastic help of my guide and interpreter Hussein Hinnawi, I was able to locate the remaining traces of her residence in Damascus; her home with its celebrated octagonal drawing-room and the high cupola ceiling, its curved alcoves for books and china, and its treasury of gilded woodcarving; her grave and – not least – Jane’s lingering legend. Even after I left Syria, Hussein continued to research the story, purely out of interest, and his contribution to this book has been invaluable.
Had I simply copied all the information amassed during research, including relevant excerpts from over 200 books and scores of newspapers, parliamentary records, Jane’s own diaries, letters and sundry papers, and those of her many friends such as Lady Anne Blunt, Isabel Burton and Emily Beaufort, the result would have been many thousands of pages of text. However, the job of a biographer is not merely to unearth and assemble facts; one must also dissect, compare, confirm and analyse; then hone the result in order to present to the reader a historically accurate, digestible and, I hope, enjoyable account of the subject.
Here, then, is my portrait of Jane Elizabeth Digby.
When Jane Elizabeth Digby was born at Forston House in Dorset on 3 April 1807 her parents had hoped for a son. However, she was such a beautiful child that her family were soon besotted with her. After all, there was time for sons and, as Jane’s aunt wrote, ‘providing the little girl is well and promising we must not hold her sex against her’.1
Later, with her large violet-blue eyes and pink-and-white complexion, little Janet (as her family called her then) was a pretty sight. Her waist-length golden hair, curling free from the prescribed banded and ringleted style, glistened halo-like in the sunshine. Her cheeks glowed: ‘a picture of health,’ local villagers said. As curious and agile as a kitten,