A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt - Softcover

"..a figure [Blunt] wrested from poetry anthologies and fleshed out into a full-blooded and Byronic character." The Guardian "Elizabeth Longford, the renowned historian, was also one of the finest British biographers of the last century." Independent "Lady Longford...the celebrated biographer." The Daily Telegraph"

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, 1840-1922, was one of England's true eccentrics: a wildly individual, larger-than-life personality who was as admired as he was disliked. A writer, poet, rebel, politician and explorer, his controversial life was in every sense a 'pilgrimage of passion'. He campaigned tirelessly for the independence of Egypt, India and Ireland (for which he was imprisoned) and, before marrying Byron's granddaughter, he travelled widely as a diplomat embarking on passionate love affairs and upsetting the Establishment - whether the British Empire or conventional morality. George Wyndham, Lord Curzon and Oscar Wilde were just some of the figures who attended Blunt's famous literary 'Crabbet Club' and young Arabists like T.E. Lawrence and St John Philby regarded him as a prophet. During his lifetime, and for many years after, no anthology was complete without his poems. Based on Wilfrid Blunt's complete diaries and papers, Elizabeth Longford has produced a riveting biography of this most compelling man.