Travels of Lady Hester Stanhope
Forming the Completion of her Memoirs

This 1846 three-volume work documents the adventures in the Middle East of the unconventional Lady Hester Stanhope (1776–1839).

Charles Lewis Meryon (Author)

9781108042291, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 22 March 2012

418 pages, 12 b/w illus.
21.6 x 14 x 2.4 cm, 0.53 kg

The adventurous and unconventional Lady Hester Stanhope (1776–1839) set off to travel to the East in the early nineteenth century. She had been hostess to her uncle, British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, and after his death she received a government pension and decided to leave England. Her personal physician Charles Meryon (1783–1877) wrote this three-volume memoir of their travels, first published in 1846. She had a reputation as an eccentric, but thought of herself as the 'Queen of the desert' and indeed achieved considerable influence in the places she travelled to. Eventually she settled in the Lebanon, where she lived out the remainder of her life. Volume 2 begins in Damascus, and includes Lady Hester's dangerous trip to Palmyra, where she had been advised it would be impossible for a woman to go. It also includes accounts of plague in Syria, and of Bedouin life.

1. Damascus
2. Lady Hester's intended journey to Palmyra
3. Precautions against riots
4. The author enters the desert
5. Reflections on the ruins of Palmyra
6. Hamah
7. Departure from Palmyra
8. Departure from Hamah
9. Residence at Latakia
10. Mode of life of Lady Hester Stanhope
11. Plague at Abra.

Subject Areas: Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]