Born: 12 March 1776, United Kingdom
Died: 23 June 1839
Country most active: International
Also known as: NA
From Famous Women: An Outline of Feminine Achievement Through the Ages With Life Stories of Five Hundred Noted Women. Written by Joseph Adelman, published 1926 by Ellis M Lonow Company:
Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope, an English traveler. She was the eldest child of Earl Stanhope by Hester, daughter of the great Earl of Chatham. At the age of twenty she entered the family of her uncle, William Pitt, with whom she lived until his death in 1806, acting as his private secretary and sharing his confidences,
Indulging in dreams of a great destiny in the Orient, she repaired in 1810 to Syria, and visited Jerusalem, Damascus, and Palmyra. The Arabs, who were struck by her powers and display of wealth, treated her as a queen, and she skillfully acted the part of a modern Zenobia.
She established herself in 1813 at the deserted convent of Mar Elias, beside the little village of Jun. Here, wearing the dress of an emir, weapons, pipe, and all, she ruled her guards and servants with absolute authority. The old convent perched upon an isolated eminence among the wildest scenery of the Lebanon, was soon converted into a fortress, garrisoned by Albanians, and became a refuge to all the persecuted and distressed who sought her assistance. So powerful was the influence which she wielded in the surrounding country, that Ibrahim Pasha, when about to invade Syria in 1832, was constrained to solicit her neutrality. She practiced astrology and other secret arts, and promulgated some peculiar religious sentiments which she held to the last. That her mind was diseased on certain points is clear from the fact that she kept in a magnificent stable two mares, on which she fancied she was to ride into Jerusalem with the Messiah at his next coming.
She died with no European near her, and surrounded by a crowd of native servants, who plundered the house almost before life had left her body. She was buried in the garden adjoining her residence.
Her Memoirs as related by Herself, were published soon after her death.
The following is excerpted from “400 Outstanding Women of the World and the Costumology of Their Time” by Minna Moscherosch Schmidt, published in 1933.
Known as “Chatham’s fiery granddaughter”; may be regarded as the forerunner of adventurous women travellers. Lady Hester Stanhope spent her early years with her grandmother, Lady Chatham, at Burton Pynsent, Somerset, where she became famous for her skill in breaking in vicious horses and for adventurous deeds generally. Then came a period when she acted as secretary to her uncle William Pitt, and made an imposing hostess at his political receptions in London.
After her uncle’s death, Lady Hester started on her travels, spending some time in Europe, chiefly at Constantinople, and finally set out for Syria. She was shipwrecked off the coast of Rhodes, and lost all her money and jewelry. Nothing daunted, she returned to England, realized her remaining property, and again set out for her Eastern goal. Over the wandering Arab tribes she gained, in time, such a powerful influence as to be regarded in Western Asia as a kind of Queen of the Desert. The six volumes of her Travels and Memoirs are marvellous reading enough, and one vividly realizes this woman of majestic figure, with a face of commanding expression and awful whiteness, dressed like an Emir, riding astride her Arab horse at the head of fierce bands of Bedouin warriors. She was marching through the desert along with the tribe to which she had allied herself, when she became aware that a hostile force was about to attack her friends, because of her presence among them. With determined heroism she resolved to withdraw from their midst and rode off into the desert without a single attendant. When she had left her friends far behind, a band of ferocious Bedouins suddenly surrounded her. As the foremost horseman advanced with spear outstretched, the Queen of the Desert rose in her stirrups, withdrew the yashmak, revealed her awful face, and, waving her arm, disdainfully cried, ‘‘Avaunt!’’ The would-be-assassin fled; but the sequel spoils the force of the story, although it does not impair Lady Hester’s valour; the attacking party were her own friends, who had come in disguise to test her courage. This intrepid lady traveller established a fortress and refuge for the persecuted and distressed at a disused convent on one of the hills of Lebanon. Here she developed into a kind of Cassandra, dabbled in the black arts, and figured as a prophetess. When Mr. Kinglake visited her there he found her a huge, gaunt woman of sixty, with commanding features, which reminded him of Chatham, dressed in Oriental male attire, a turban of pale cashmere shawls around her head, and ruling her Albanian guard with a rod of iron. She admitted neither books nor newspapers into her fortress, her only food was milk, which possibly accounted for the astonishing whiteness of her face; and her one luxury was smoking, which she indulged in sitting Eastern fashion, upon the floor. She was reduced to great privation in her last years, and died without a single attendant of her own sex or nationality near her; both her temporal sway and prophetic power over the Arab tribes having gone also. This extraordinary woman was, in her own way, both kind and good.
“Show me,” she would say, “where the poor and needy are, and let the rich shift for themselves.”