Annotations to Lady Anne Blunt’s Journals and Correspondence

Lady Anne’s Journals and Correspondence, edited by Rosemary Archer and James Fleming, and published by Alexander Heriot & Co. Ltd Booksellers and Publishers in 1986, is, together with the Abbas Pasha Manuscript (Forbis and Sherif), the most important publication on the Arabian horse in recent memory.

I have read it time and again, and I keep marveling at its editors’ skill and effort in transcribing hundreds of handwritten letters and journal entries, and putting them in their proper historical context. That said, neither editor is an Arabist, to my knowledge, and, in light of Lady Anne’s lifelong relationship with the Arab world and the large number of Arabic proper and common names in her Journals, this seems to have prevented them from properly transcribing many of these Arabic names; in some cases, lady Anne may have been the source of the mis-trancsription.

So I have ventured to makes notes of these corrections in a separate page of this blog, and substantiate these annotations and corrections with evidence, in the hope that further editions could take them into account, or at least be aware of them. This ongoing effort will be found at daughterofthewind.org/labjournals