During the Crimean War, Arundell was refused three times in her quest to be a "Nightingale nurse" and instead set up a group of 150 like-minded women from Catholic families known as the Stella Club to assist the wives and children of soldiers who had married without permission and for whom the Army took no responsibility.

[2] The Arundel family crossed the Channel to Boulogne in 1850, reducing their expenses, and avoiding the Anti-Catholicism following the return of Dr. Nicholas Wiseman as England's Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster.

The girls were learning French in the Sacré Coeur convent during the day, but were allowed strolls along the Haute Ville ramparts, when Isabel and Blanche met Richard Burton.

He encouraged her to write and she wrote a number of books, including among them a history of their travels in Syria and Palestine, as well as an autobiography, published posthumously.

It has been summed up: His wife, fearful lest her husband be thought vicious because he collected data on what Victorian England called vice, at once burned the projected new edition of The Perfumed Garden he had been annotating.

She then wrote a biography of Burton in which she tried to fashion this Rabelaisian scholar-adventurer into a good Catholic, a faithful husband, and a refined and modest man.

[4]In an appendix to her unfinished autobiography,[5] Isabel Burton's posthumous collaborator William Henry Wilkins pointed out that she had a first offer of £6,000 for the manuscript, and moreover that she need never have disclosed her actions at all, or blamed them on her husband.

[7] Her body and that of her husband lie in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalen Roman Catholic Church Mortlake in southwest London, in an elaborate tomb in the shape of a Bedouin tent which she designed.