tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6117194181116669144.post54435014746660634..comments2023-11-03T05:59:43.804-07:00Comments on A Bloomsbury Life: Move over, Angelina!Lisa Borgnes Giramontihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08708026781435832810noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6117194181116669144.post-72808420186309696712009-01-06T08:54:00.000-08:002009-01-06T08:54:00.000-08:001. LOVE Jane Digby...read a wonderful book years ...1. LOVE Jane Digby...read a wonderful book years ago that included bios of her, Isabelle Burton and others, can't remember the name. Have you read Lesley Blanch, "The Wilder Shores of Love"?<BR/><BR/>2. To an Aesthete's Lament, thank you for including that excellent Time magazine review. The book was indeed dismissed when it came out among the cognoscenti, in part because of her frank retellings of all her uncensored escapades. She was a character, all right.Lisa Borgnes Giramontihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08708026781435832810noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6117194181116669144.post-3818628419931593942009-01-05T22:24:00.000-08:002009-01-05T22:24:00.000-08:00From a review of the book when published, from Tim...From a review of the book when published, from Time magazine: <BR/><BR/>Last week three more feminine autobiographies were published. The silliest of the new crop was a muddled concoction called And I'd Do If Again, written with a lurid, Sunday-supplement archness, by a daughter of the wealthy and picturesque Crocker family of San Francisco, detailing her travels in the Far East, her love affairs with a Japanese baron, a Chinese tyrant, a Borneo chieftain and a four-yard boa constrictor named Kaa. Aimee Crocker first became aware of the lure of the Orient when, at the age of 10, she demanded that her mother buy her an elaborate Chinese bed that she saw in San Francisco. "Very young indeed was I.'' she writes, "when the finger of the East reached out across the Pacific and touched me." No sooner had the East put the finger on her than her mother sent her to Germany to be educated. There she fell in love with a German prince (un-named), and was taken to Madrid, where she fell in love with a bullfighter. The impressionable young lady then returned to San Francisco, married [Richard Porter Ashe, with whom she had a daughter, Gladys], was almost killed in a train wreck on her honeymoon, got a divorce, hired a 70-ft. schooner and set out for the South Seas, scandalizing the missionaries in Hawaii on the way by taking part in an "orgy," the precise details of which she does not disclose.<BR/><BR/>Marrying again [to Henry Gillig], Aimee was soon divorced, and after melodramatic experiences with Oriental lovers she landed in India. "India." she writes, "here I am. A country whose individual life covers over 4,000 years, and whose living breath had been blowing upon me across broad seas, whose finger had been beckoning me." The boa constrictor did not enter her life until she had returned to New York. The pet of a Hindu princess, it took a strange liking to Miss Crocker, coiled itself around her, stayed with her all the time. She gave an elaborate dinner for it. The dinner was a great success, except that the newspapers "picked it up and made the story into that of an orgy."<BR/><BR/>NOTE: Born Amy Isabella Crocker (1871-1941), she was married, for a third time, to Jackson Gouraud, who promptly died (two adopted children, Yvonne and Reginald). Then she married a fake prince, Alexandre Miskinoff, and divorced him. Then she married, as her fifth husband, a real prince, Mstislav Alexandrovich Galitizine, 28 years her junior; they wed in 1925 and divorced in 1927.An Aesthete's Lamenthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09620941811191294750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6117194181116669144.post-11470082156703473892009-01-05T22:11:00.000-08:002009-01-05T22:11:00.000-08:00Dear God, She sounds sublime. And difficult.Dear God, She sounds sublime. And difficult.An Aesthete's Lamenthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09620941811191294750noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6117194181116669144.post-69471937337981500682009-01-05T20:01:00.000-08:002009-01-05T20:01:00.000-08:00this sounds phenomenal - a must-read for sure. it...this sounds phenomenal - a must-read for sure. it's incredible how real lives can be so much more extraordinary and wild than anything we could dream up. Have you read the bio of Jane Digby? Great stuff. Thanks for this! EEEEmily Evans Eerdmanshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12434821015450147843noreply@blogger.com