Wild life of a white warrior goddess

Star Of The Morning: The Extraordinary Life Of Lady Hester Stanhope by Kirsten Ellis (HarperCollins, £25) By Katie Hickman Last updated at 5:30 PM on 22nd August 2008 What is it about ‘the east’ that seems to attract powerful Englishwomen? Some of our most fearless travellers - Isabel Burton, Lady Jane Digby, Gertrude Bell – all found something there answering to the deepest part of themselves. Each of them, however, was following in the footsteps of Lady Hester Stanhope, first among equals, and the subject of this spirited new biography. 'What are we going to do about this English princess?' a Syrian sheik once sighed. 'After all, she is not merely a woman.' A sentiment which, for different reasons, was shared by almost everyone who knew her.Other women feature little in Hester Stanhope’s life. All her life she preferred the company of men, and they she. The daughter of the renegade 3rd Earl Stanhope, Hester had an unusual degree of independence from an early age. She learnt to use firearms, and was a superb horsewoman (skills which, in later life, greatly impressed the Bedouin, and may even have saved her life). After the death of her mother she kept house for her uncle, William Pitt the Younger, at Walmer Castle in Kent, where she mixed with men of power and influence, and embarked on a number of affairs with them - a degree of promiscuity unusual even by randy Georgian standards (where most aristocratic women waited to be safely married, with at least a couple of legitimate children, before branching out). Ellis calls this behaviour ‘slightly scandalous’, but it was surely more than this, and does much to explain the almost total absence of women friends. After the death of Pitt, Hester decided to leave England, and set out with her lover Michael Bruce - a man thirteen years younger than she - on a journey to the Levant. Their open co-habitation, even if it was in far-flung lands, was a scandal that even Hester could not contain: she never returned to England. If Hester cared a fig for her English ‘reputation’ it was not in her nature to repine. Instead she kept on travelling, to Constantinople, to Egypt, the Holy Land, and finally to Syria. She adopted eastern dress (a man’s, of course) and rode astride, and such was the reputation that preceded her that when she arrived among the Bedouin in Palmyra they greeted her ‘like a white warrior goddess’, like Zenobia herself. 'I shall soon have as many names as Apollo,' she wrote triumphantly. 'I am the sun, the star, the pearl, the lion, the light from Heaven.' Star Of The Morning is a fascinating and atmospheric biography of a truly remarkable woman. Kirsten Ellis has left no stone unturned in this admirable book, doing some mean travelling of her own in the process, and it is not her fault if the personality of Lady Hester remains curiously elusive. Who really knew her? Even in her own lifetime Hester seems to have evaded those who knew her longest. She was attracted, as if by a magnet, to anything secret. In later life, by now permanently settled in the Lebanon, she offered herself, with her by now vast knowledge of the internecine politics of the region, as an agent to the East India Company, and at one point had no fewer than five men collecting intelligence on her behalf. She dabbled in mysticism, in esoteric cults, in treasure hunting and freemasonry; at one point she seems to have believed herself to be the Messiah. It is no surprise to learn that many people believed her to have supernatural powers; and others that she had gone quite mad. It seems inevitable that a personality as ‘violent’ as Hester’s should end in what can at best be described as eccentricity. In England she was too often dismissed as ‘poor, mad Lady Hester’, but this would be to underestimate her very real gifts, and particularly her subtle political mind. In the Lebanon her legacy is somewhat more macabre. In 1988, when the 150 year old remains of a woman were found in the hills, the local people were in no doubt who it was. The British Embassy was told that they belonged ‘to a famous Englishwoman still well remembered in these parts’. In Joun, near the hill-top fortress that was her last home, those still living can remember the elders of the village talking about her: ‘You can have dinner with El Sytt, and even sleep with her, but do not stay in her house. When a man goes to be with her, it will not be long before he will not wake up.’