This book charts the biographies of four women who 'belonged to the West but dared to turn to the East for adventure and love.

But each had already some resource and backing through education and family station to undertake the journey they did, despite it also being so unconventional within their own time. Isabelle began dressing as a boy and, being tall, slim, and flat chested, she could carry this off well.

Rose carefully handles the issues and struggles in this tale, that as tough as they are, you accept them and each persons actions and reactions and respond in kind with joy, passion, anger, hatred and determination to see them be reunited once more.

This life is a series of closely-linked monogamous relationships, some involving marriage, and children, but not necessarily all having either characteristic.The very popular Irish playwright and literary London figure wrote several plays about relationships, in which his observations about love and human behaviour in the romantic context – and in the institution of marriage – pour out in abundance. I found the portraits of these little-known women fascinating, and particularly loved the suggestion that Napoleon's defeat in Russia was brought about by a Frenchwoman in a harem who was furious with him for divorcing her cousin, Josephine.