Lesley Blanch | World traveler, writer, 102
Lesley Blanch, an English author of biography, travel memoirs and cookbooks whose best-known work, The Wilder Shores of Love , tells of four 19th-century European women who were as adventurous as Ms. Blanch was in her life, has died. She was 102.
Lesley Blanch, an English author of biography, travel memoirs and cookbooks whose best-known work,
The Wilder Shores of Love
, tells of four 19th-century European women who were as adventurous as Ms. Blanch was in her life, has died. She was 102.
A world traveler who often toured alone in Afghanistan, Egypt and elsewhere, Ms. Blanch died May 7 in Menton, France, her longtime home. The cause was not given.
The Wilder Shores of Love, her first book, became an immediate success when it was published in 1954. In it she profiles four women who left convention behind.
She also wrote two cookbooks, Around the World in 80 Dishes (1955) and From Wilder Shores (1989), with chapters on meals she had while hitchhiking in Afghanistan and riding the Trans-Siberian railway.
Born in London in 1904, she married Romain Gary, a French author and diplomat, in 1945. They lived in Paris, Los Angeles, and Sofia, Bulgaria, among other cities where he was posted. They divorced in the early 1960s.
When the marriage ended, Ms. Blanch left Los Angeles for Paris and, in the early 1970s, settled in Menton. From there she continued to travel, to Cairo, Egypt; Tehran, Iran; and the Caucasus, among other places.
- Los Angeles Times