Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope, Vol I

She was an English aristocrat who dressed as a man, smoked cigars, and rode across the Syrian desert with a caravan of servants. Lady Hester Stanhope refused every convention of her time, and in 1810 she hired a young physician named Charles Meryon to accompany her on a voyage to the East. What followed were seven years of wandering through Sicily, Egypt, Palmyra, and finally to a palace she built on Mount Lebanon. Meryon recorded her nightly conversations, her opinions on Napoleon and Byron, her run-ins with pashas, and the scandals that had made her a legend. This volume captures her at her most vivid and unrepentant, telling her own story in her own words. For anyone fascinated by women who refused to be small, this memoir is a window into a brilliant, dangerous, utterly uncompromising life.