SIR RICHARD BURTON'S WIFE Jean BurtonKnopf ($3).
This is the story no less of Isabel Burton than of her spectacular husband, translator of the Arabian Nights. But she was at least a match for him. They were as daft, disarming a pair of eccentrics as boredom with Victorian England produced.
Burton was a cross between Byron and Major Hooplea proud, fierce, foolish, gifted man with one streak of true genius a genius for failure. Isabel, like her husband, was a rebel, but of a far more conventional sort. Her rebelliousness began like the romantic dreams of any English Backfisch; it was her...
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