Lady Hester Stanhope

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 371, 2 August 1946, Page 10

Lady Hester Stanhope

[ ADY HESTER STANHOPE is the latest addition to the gallery of English Eccentrics, heard from 2YA on Friday nights, and having heard her story presented in succinct, dramatic form, shorn of the untidiness of eccentricity while preserving the dramatic appeal of the state, one is tempted to wonder whether Lady Hester’s method did not outweigh her madness. But it would be out of place to launch into a discussion of what constitutes eccentricity, for this was dealt with fully in the first talk of the series. It was probably eccentric of Lady Hester to believe the prophesy that she would ride into Jerusalem beside the Messiah and be crowned Queen of the Jews; it was eccentric of her to maintain an elaborate system of spies to keep her informed of European intrigues while she shivered in a torn pelisse amid mouldering furniture. But assuming it was power and fame she prized, the poverty.and loneliness of her life’s end was a small price to pay for the knowledge that the peoples of her Lebanon domain quaked at her name, and that even when she was dying the Egyptian Viceroy did not dare to violate her tiny kingdom. Had she not been "eccentric" she might have ended her days as miserably in the retirement of an English watering-place, fit subject for the pen of the young Dickens. But as Joan Haslip puts it her eccentricity gained her lasting fame not only as the last of the 18th Century eccentrics but as the first of the 19th Century pioneers.