Background
Anne Isabella Noel Blunt was born on September 22, 1837, in the United Kingdom to William King (Lord Lovelace), and Augusta Ada Byron.
(This book documents the journey of Lady Anne Blunt to Ara...)
This book documents the journey of Lady Anne Blunt to Arabia in 1875.
https://www.amazon.com/Pilgrimage-Nejd-Cradle-Arab-Race/dp/1931956901/?tag=2022091-20
Anne Isabella Noel Blunt was born on September 22, 1837, in the United Kingdom to William King (Lord Lovelace), and Augusta Ada Byron.
It is known that Anne traveled with her father through the Continent at the age of fifteen, following her mother’s death. It was during these travels that she learned to speak French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Swiss patois. She also learned a little Arabic, and later in her life became fluent in the language. She studied violin and drawing and was excellently bred.
Not much is known about Lady Anne’s life before she married Wilfrid Blunt.
By the time the Blunts were married, Wilfrid Blunt had served as a diplomat in Athens, Frankfurt, Madrid, Paris, Lisbon, and Bern. He had retired from diplomacy and was working on his writing and the pursuit of what Longford calls a “Religion of Happiness” (having lost his faith in the Bible). The couple traveled through Spain, and in the spring of 1873, they traveled to Turkey. The next year they traveled to Algeria. In 1875 they took a steamship down the Suez Canal to Cairo, where they learned Arabic. When the Blunts discovered that the Royal Geographical Society’s maps of central Arabia were out of date, they decided to explore the region. In 1877 they departed for Syria, then under Turkish rule. Meanwhile, the couple became enamored of the Arabian horses they rode on their travels. They transported six mares to England and began breeding Arabian horses at their estate, Crabbet.
Lady Blunt recorded their two major trips to the Near East and the Arabian peninsula in her books, Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates (1879) and A Pilgrimage to Nejd, the Cradle of the Arab Race: A Visit to the Court of the Arab Emir, and “Our Persian Campaign” (1881). She supplemented these volumes with her own maps, portraits, illustrations, and drawings. The books are based on spontaneously written notes and rewritten material, with frequent references to the act of writing. She captured snatches of dialogue and first impressions, in order to endow her writing with an authentic voice.
The Blunts sailed to Alexandretta, traveled by mule to Aleppo, joined the tribes of the Anazeh, crossed Mesopotamia and arrived in Baghdad. There they were given introduction letters to the sheikhs of Shammar, who were enemies of the Anazeh. They crossed the desert by camel.
They returned to Syria by December 1878 and then made their pilgrimage to Nejd. On the way, Lady Blunt rescued the party from an attack by twelve Roala horsemen by surrendering in Arabic. Once in Nejd, they were welcomed by the emir, Mohammed Ibn Rashid. After this visit, they journeyed with three thousand Muslim devotees to Persia at the invitation of Ali KoliKhan, son of the Persian Gulf Bactiari tribe’s leader. The Blunts met with several difficulties along the way, including Wilfrid’s bout of dysentery.
In 1879 the Blunts traveled to India to visit Edward Robert Bulwer, viceroy of India. They returned to England for a while and then departed again for Egypt in 1880. Throughout their travels, Wilfrid Blunt involved himself in politics, mediating between European colonial powers and indigenous people. Following England’s conflicts over Egypt in the 1880s, he began to side with oppressed nations. He established the Arabi Defense Fund to support Egypt’s struggle for independence and purchased a home in there called Sheykh Obeyd. He wrote about Islam in order to help Europeans better understand the people and culture of the Middle East. As events progressed for the worst, the Blunts were banished from Sheykh Obeyd. In 1883, they traveled to Ceylon, Madras, Hyderabad, and Calcutta. They returned to England in 1884, where Wilfrid made two unsuccessful (but narrowly lost) bids for a seat in Parliament. He gave up politics for Roman Catholicism and joined his wife on a trip to Rome in 1886. They were allowed to return to Sheykh Obeyd in 1887 but returned five months later so Wilfrid could participate in Irish politics. He was imprisoned for two months, ran unsuccessfully for Parliament again, and eventually lost faith in politics and religion.
In 1892, Lady Anne completed her only poem, an eight-line piece based on a foxhunting incident at Sheykh Obeyd. She presented this to Wilfrid for his sixty-first birthday. She and her husband collaborated on her translation of Abu Zaid’s The Celebrated Romance of the Stealing of the Mare: An Arabic Epic of the Tenth Century (1892) and The Seven Golden Odes of Pagan Arabia, Known Also as the Moallakat (1903). Lady Anne translated, and Blunt set the works in verse.
When Lady Blunt died in Cairo on December 15, 1917, she left her husband nothing but paperwork on her Arabian stud.
(This book documents the journey of Lady Anne Blunt to Ara...)
After her husband miraculous recovery, Anne witnessed a vision of her three dead children (while on the way to Bushire), and decided to become a devout Catholic.
Lady Blunt complained that she found the Bedouins ungrateful, meandering, and talkative. However, she did admire their talent, beauty, and strength.
Anne's husband is known to have said (according to biographer Elizabeth Longford in A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt) “she had never committed any act less than entirely conscientious and entirely honorable.”
Syrine Hout writes in Dictionary of Literary Biography that Lady Blunt’s “facility in learning Arabic, her passion for riding horses and camels, her sketching ability, and her habit of keeping a neat and detailed journal made her an ideal traveling companion.”
Lady Blunt was engaged to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt for only two months before their June 8, 1869, wedding at Saint George’s Church in Hanover Square, London. After miscarriages in 1870 and 1872 she gave birth to their daughter, Judith Blunt, in 1873.
Wilfrid’s infidelities were destroying his marriage with Lady Anne.
As the Blunts’ marriage continued to deteriorate, Wilfrid carried out an affair with Mary Wyndham, Lady Elcho. In 1889 Wilfrid left his family, on the pretense of a trip in support of Egyptian nationalism, to take Wyndham on a “desert honeymoon” to Sheykh Obeyd. Though Wyndham had a daughter by Blunt, their relationship ended in the spring of 1895. The Blunts separated for a time when Wilfrid traveled to Damascus in 1904. He contracted malarial fever and she sold Sheykh Obeyd (at a profit of 4,000 percent). Upon his return, Lady Anne provided assistance in a number of Blunt’s subsequent books. Nevertheless, he had estranged himself from his wife and daughter through his affair with the young and devoted Dorothy Carleton. Judith attempted to reconcile her parents in 1915. They had a pleasant business meeting, and never saw each other again.
