LITMIR.BIZ

       Preface

      Friends often ask me how I choose my subjects. The answer is that my subjects usually choose me, and so it was with Jane Digby.

      This book began at a cocktail party at the RAF Club in London in the spring of 1992 when Jane Digby’s name and her story came up in conversation. I had never heard of her, so I made a mental note to do some research and rapidly found myself in the early stages of an obsession that was to last several years. Who was Jane Digby, and why should she cast such an appeal?

      Born into the English aristocracy with every conceivable advantage in physical beauty, social position and wealth, Jane spent the final years of her life married to a desert prince. The Palladian mansions and gilded Mayfair salons of her youth made way for low black goat-hair tents and rugs spread upon wind-washed sands. Even now, with jet travel and motorised transport, the Syrian desert is one of the few lonely places left on earth. What unlikely circumstance, I wondered, had led Jane Digby there a century

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