Jungle queen

Biographers find their subjects in all manner of strange places. Philip Eade found his - Sylvia Brooke, the infamous ranee of Sarawak and (according to Eade's entertaining new book) the self-styled 'Queen of the Headhunters' - at the obituary desk of The Daily Telegraph.

In 2002, Eade was contacted by a man named Stewart McNair, suggesting an obituary of his aunt, Elizabeth Brooke Vidmer. Known in her youth as 'Princess Pearl', Aunt Elizabeth had been one of three 'dangerously beautiful' daughters born to Sylvia and Sir Vyner Brooke, the last white ranee and rajah to rule Sarawak, the jungle kingdom on the island of Borneo.

Before that moment, Eade says he had never heard of the white rajahs, much less the Brookes, whose reign in Sarawak lasted a little more than a century. James Brooke became the first governor in 1842; Vyner, the last rajah, ruled from 1918 to 1946, although the Japanese occupied Sarawak from 1941 to 1945 until the Australian army liberated the island. The only English family ever to occupy an oriental throne, the Brookes had their own flag, their own currency and their own postage stamps, not to mention the power of life and death over half a million Malays.

Fascinated by this story of eccentric aristocrats in the dying days of the British Empire, Eade considered writing a biography of Vyner. 'I was going to call it The Reluctant Rajah. Vyner was lazy, charming, whimsical, but rather bored by the whole business of being king. Not a bad man, but probably not fitted for the role,' says Eade.

The closer Eade looked, however, the more interested he became in Vyner's wife, Sylvia (right). Beloved of London gossip columnists throughout the 1920s and 30s, Sylvia, with her outrageous title, clothes and reputation, earned her many soubriquets such as 'that most charming of despots'. Even her own brother, Oliver, called his sister 'a female Iago'.

'One of the difficulties I have wrestled with is that Sylvia's such an exasperating character, very hard to like and very hard to understand,' Eade says. She did things for the joy of shocking people. One rumour was that Sylvia greeted new recruits arriving in Sarawak by asking if they had slept together before.' Offsetting this exhibitionism was real vulnerability and a somewhat troubled soul - something Eade traces to Sylvia's lonely and desperate childhood. Born in 1885, Sylvia was the fourth child of Reginald 'Reggie' Brett, the second Viscount Esher, and Eleanor van de Weyer. She had two brothers (Oliver and Maurice) and a sister, Dorothy, who would become famous as the Bloomsbury painter Dorothy Brett.

'Sylvia and Dorothy were both completely ignored by their father,' Eade says. 'Reggie also disliked Oliver, but he utterly loved his middle son, Morris.' Shy and troubled, Sylvia was sexually 'mauled' by her father's secretary, later writing that the trauma inspired two suicide attempts before her 12th birthday. A painful, introverted adolescence followed, during which Sylvia found solace in writing: love stories at first, and later tales that reflected her experiences of Sarawak. 'I would say she is a good letter writer, but not a good novelist,' Eade explains.