Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope
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The dramatic story of Lady Hester Stanhope – a wilful beauty turned bohemian adventurer – who left England as a young woman, unashamedly enjoyed a string of lovers and established her own exotic fiefdom in the Lebanese mountains where she died in 1839.Ambitious, daring and uncompromising, Lady Hester Stanhope was never cut out for a conventional life. Born into an illustrious political dynasty, she played society hostess for her uncle, William Pitt the Younger. After his death, she struck out for unchartered territory, setting sail with her lover for the Mediterranean and Constantinople – turning her back on England, as events would transpire, forever.It was in the Middle East, however, that she found her destiny. As the greatest female traveller of her age, she was the first western woman to cross the Syrian desert, where she was hailed by the Bedouin as their ‘Star of the Morning’. From her labyrinthine fortress in the mountains of Lebanon, where she established what amounted to her own fiefdom, she exerted a canny influence over the region's devious politics.Hers was a life of adventure and intrigue – yet in the years following her death her remarkable story has been largely dismissed, reworked by the Victorians into a cautionary tale for young women with wayward tendencies. This captivating biography, drawing on fresh research from three continents, resurrects Hester as the complex, courageous and fearless woman she was, bringing to life her hidden loves, friendships and ambitions. More than a mere traveller, here was a woman whose aspirations led her straight to the heart of the shadowy race for influence between the great powers of the nineteenth century – a world of shifting alliances, double agents, romance, intrigue and murder. Above all, Lady Hester Stanhope was a woman driven by her desire to make a mark on the world, whose search for love and spiritual meaning in a war-torn Middle East provide an illuminating and moving parallel for our time.
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Kirsten Ellis. Star of the Morning: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Hester Stanhope
Star of the Morning. The Extraordinary Life of. LADY HESTER STANHOPE
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Lady Hester Stanhope’s Family Tree
Maps
Prologue
1 Beginnings
2 The Minority of One
3 The Company of Men
4 A Summoning of Strength
5 Love and Escape
6 A Bolt-hole on the Bosphorus
7 Indecision
8 Friendships
9 Under the Minaret
10 The Desert Queen
11 Separation and Despair
12 ‘The Queen Orders Her Minister’
13 A Chained-up Tigress
14 ‘I Will Be No Man’s Agent’
15 The Broken Statue
16 Revenge
17 ‘I Am Done With All Respectability’
18 Mr Kocub’s Spy
19 The Sun At Midnight
20 Djoun
21 The Mahdi’s Bride
22 The Last Dance
Epilogue
Bibliography. Archives
Books and Journals
Index
Acknowledgements
Notes
Abbreviations
Prologue
Chapter 1: Beginnings
Chapter 2: The Minority of One
Chapter 3: The Company of Men
Chapter 4: A Summoning of Strength
Chapter 5: Love and Escape
Chapter 6: A Bolt-hole on the Bosphorus
Chapter 7: Indecision
Chapter 8: Friendships
Chapter 9: Under the Minaret
Chapter 10: The Desert Queen
Chapter 11: Separation and Despair
Chapter 12: ‘The Queen Orders Her Minister’
Chapter 13: A Chained-up Tigress
Chapter 14: ‘I Will Be No Man’s Agent’
Chapter 15: The Broken Statue
Chapter 16: Revenge
Chapter 17: ‘I Am Done With All Respectability’
Chapter 18: Mr Kocub’s Spy
Chapter 19: The Sun At Midnight
Chapter 20: Djoun
Chapter 21: The Mahdi’s Bride
Chapter 22: The Last Dance
Epilogue
Copyright
About the Publisher
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KIRSTEN ELLIS
Your true friend, Dayr
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No matter what sweetness little Griselda exhibited, her grandmother could not help showing favouritism. Writing to her friend Lady Chatham, betraying a grim pride at their wilful granddaughter, Grizel wrote: ‘Hester is quite wild. I am forced to send assistance from here to keep her within bounds’.9 In an earlier letter, Lady Chatham too had noted with delight that ‘My namesake is so merry, she not only laughs all day, but also all night, to the no small disturbance of those who during the latter would choose to sleep’.10 The following year, while her daughter-in-law, pregnant for a third time, was in London, Grizel wrote: ‘I am grown quite a fool about Hester. What a wonderful and amiable child … I have hopes her sister will be such another. Hester said – the next must be a boy, for two girls are enough for anybody. If like her, a dozen would be welcome to me, so I am quite calm and feel no impatience on that score.’
In February 1780, a month before Hester’s fourth birthday, Lady Mahon gave birth in London to a third daughter, Lucy, a frail and pretty newborn, but her recovery was complicated by the onset of puerperal fever. At twenty-five, Lady Mahon was exhausted by her succession of pregnancies. She seemed at first to improve, and rallied slightly in spring. Her sister Harriot wrote from Harley Street that she is looking after the ‘Invalid’ in April, telling her mother hopefully that ‘she gains strength visibly every day’.11 By May she reported that her sister ‘bore a drive in the hottest day imaginable without suffering from it in the least’, and how they went shopping for lute strings and chintzes.12 The ‘Invalid’ was apparently well enough to attend a ball at Gloucestershire House, and Charles was so convinced of her good progress that he went on a tour of Buckinghamshire, where he planned to run for Parliament.
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