Her own best invention

Lesley Blanch, who died in 2007 aged almost 103, did not want this book written. Having spent her whole life spinning a web of romantic tales around herself, the last thing she needed was a patient, dogged writer checking up on her, unpicking the fibs and the fantasies and unlocking the skeletons from their cupboards. Anne Boston, who admires her tricky subject and is well aware that fantasies can be as revealing as facts, nevertheless feels obliged, rightly in my view, to play the detective.

It was not until she was 50 that Blanch (born in 1904) published her first and instantly successful book, The Wilder Shores of Love, in which she described the romantic adventures of four European women in North Africa and the Middle East. By that time she had had a good few romantic adventures herself, and come a long way from the modest middle-class background in Chiswick where she grew up. She was a pretty, clever, wayward only child whose mother encouraged her in a passion for all things exotic and foreign, especially Russian.

In Journey into the Mind’s Eye, her outstandingly unreliable autobiography, published when she was 68, Blanch conjured up a Russian friend of her parents she called ‘The Traveller’, a mesmerising figure with a smooth bald head, slanted oriental eyes and a long sharp little finger nail, who enchanted her when she was a little girl, seduced her on a train when she was 17 and promised her marriage before abruptly vanishing when she was 21. Whether he ever existed outside her imagination is impossible, despite valiant efforts, for her biographer to tell, but it seems most likely that he was a composite figure, derived from Blanch’s youthful passion for the then fashionable Russian designers, dancers and writers and her affair with the powerful Russian-born director, Feodor Komisarjevsky, one of her early lovers.