![]() ![]() Other wives corresponded about the opulence and romance of their assignments (one, in particular, was greatly impressed by the coronation of Czar Nicholas I). Many were driven to letter-writing by loneliness and hardship, but they managed to convey the thrill and challenge of their exotic surroundings. Most, like Catherine Macartney and Ella Sykes (posted to the Chinese-Russian border), claimed their places in this history because of their voluminous correspondence. Some, like Emma Hamilton (Naples), Isabel Burton (Brazil and Syria), and Vita Sackville-West (Persia) are well known in their own right. Hickman, herself the daughter of an ambassadress, calls primarily on the journals and letters of some remarkable ladies, whether dotty or not, who followed their husbands to posts ranging from Constantinople in the 17th century to Slovakia in the 1990s. ![]() “English ambassadresses are usually on the dotty side,” Hickman quotes Nancy Mitford’s view in the introduction to her account of the not-so-glamorous side of embassy life, originally published in England in 1999. ![]() An inside view of the lives and responsibilities of the valiant women who married officers of the British Foreign Service, where rules were rigid but creativity counted for a lot. ![]()
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