Product Description

Richard Burton's life offers dazzling riches. He was one of the greatest Victorian explorers, an innovative translator and brilliant linguist, a prolific travel writer, a pioneer in the fields of anthropology and sexual psychology, a mesmeric lover, a spy and a publisher of erotica.
Fawn Brodie has created a vivid portrait of this remarkable man, who emerges from the richly textured fabric of his time. His travels to Mecca and Medina dressed as a Muslim pilgrim, his witnessing of the human sacrifices at Dahomey and his unlikely but loving partnership with his pious catholic bride are all treated with warmth, scholarship and understanding

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36281 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Review
"No one could fail to write a good life of Burton, but Fawn Brodie has written a brilliant one" J. H. Plumb, New York Times

J H Plumb, The New York Times
Her scholarship is wide and searching, and her understanding of Burton and his wife both wide and deep.

Graham Greene, The Observer
The latest, by far the best and surely the final biography of Sir Richard Burton.

Customer Reviews

The Devil Drives
One of the finest biographies I have read - I really can't recommend it highly enough.

Burton is among the most fascinating figures of the nineteenth century (or any century for the matter). He can claim to be one of the finest linguists of his age - he spoke 25 languages (40 dialects in all) and translated from Hindustani, Portuguese, Arabic, Italian, Sanskrit and Latin. His translation of the Arabian Nights is still the standard by which all others are judged.

These linguistic talents and a prodigous amount of hard work allowed Burton to draw far more from his journeys than other explorers of the age (the comparison with Speke is particularly strongly drawn by Brodie, who, unsurprisingly, comes down firmly on Burton's side). He was one of the pioneers of anthropology and the lengthy accounts he made of his travels, although of varying quality, proved to be pioneering works on the language, culture, religion, and history of these regions. Alongside his famous explorations of Mecca and Eastern Africa, Brodie's biography also covers his less well known (to me at any rate) journeys to India, Utah, Brazil and Syria amongst others.

Brodie provides a wonderful portrait of Burton's character and his complex relationship with his staunchly Catholic wife Isabel. Burton was a fierce critic of the conservative British society of the 19th Century, and dismissive of the Church's role in it - yet his wife seemed to embody many of the values that sustained this very society. Of course, his interest in sexuality and erotica was also a constant thorn in the side of their relationship. Nevertheless, as Brodie points out, the relationship worked despite these apparent clashes, not least because Isabel was in many ways a remarkable woman in her own right. However, the tragic postscript of Burton's story is his wife's decision to burn both his voluminous collection of journals and his final translation following his death. That Isabel could convince herself that this was what her husband would have wished represents an astonishing exercise in self-delusion. Whatever her merits, this is the decision for which she will always be remembered.

Superlative biography of an astonishing man
I loved this book. I had only a vague idea of who Richard Burton was and what he had done before I bought the book. He was one of the most remarkable figures of the Victorian era - a linguist and explorer - among his other exploits, he visited Mecca disguised as muslim pilgrim, and played a major (and controversial) role in the search for the source of the Nile. Brodie's book recounts these and other tales in an intelligent, articulate and highly readable way. Some of her speculations on Burton's psychology may be a little 'over-the-top' but this is a very minor flaw. I highly recommend this book, which deserves to be more widely known.