NONFICTION : The Girls Next Door: A 12th-Century Mystic, a Spy, an Aviatrix, a Persian Princess, a Mother and a Journalist

TAJ AL SALTANA CROWNING ANGUISH: Memoirs of a Persian Princess From the Harem to Modernity, 1884-1914 edited and with an introduction by Abbas Amanat. (Mage: $29.95; 352 pp.) Born in 1884 to Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, ruler of Iran, Taj al Saltana was, in her own words, a “beautiful, adorable child.” But not for long. Married at age 13 (“Oh what a cursed day, what an evil hour!”) to a mean-spirited bisexual brat, she was able to move from the harem that she had been raised in to his house. She began her memoirs, which cover a 30-year period of political and social change in Iran, in 1914. Taj’s account of her childhood in the royal harem ( andarum) is the only account so far by an insider. The Golestan Palace in central Tehran was surrounded by the high walls of the Royal Citadel (Arg-e Saltum). Guarded by an army of eunuchs, the Arg housed 80 wives and roughly 800 maidservants. Naser, with a predilection for peasant girls, brought several into his harem. They in turn invited their friends and relatives and a new courtier class was born. Around the harem, women wore white tights, short skirts and open blouses. “In the course of the year,” writes Taj, “they were not visited by any grief, difficulty, pain or bitterness.” When tensions between women grew unmanageable, the shah ordered the electric lights out and encouraged the women to have at each other. I’m not sure that Taj, self styled “madame de salon” in her adult life, is really the “ardent feminist” that Abbas Amanat describes in his introduction, but the seeds of discontent sown in that protected childhood certainly grew to the half-hearted rebellion of messy liaisons and libertine lifestyle that characterized her adulthood.