Dies in her sleep at her mountain residence at Djoun near Sidon, having lived for years as a reclusive but locally revered figure.
Lady Hester Stanhope died on 23 June 1839 at her isolated residence at Djoun (Joun), in the mountains near Sidon in present-day Lebanon. By the time of her death, she had lived for nearly two decades in the Levant, having withdrawn increasingly from contact with European visitors and society, surrounded instead by servants, local retainers, and the astrologers and mystics whose company she preferred in her final years.
Her later life had been marked by mounting debts, ill health, and eccentric behavior, including a firm belief in astrology and prophecy, and a self-image as a quasi-mystical, semi-royal figure destined to lead a messianic movement in the East. Despite financial ruin—her British government pension had been cut off amid disputes over her debts—she was regarded by local Druze, Muslim, and Christian communities alike with a mixture of awe, respect, and superstition, owing to her earlier acts of political mediation, hospitality, and medical charity.
She died largely alone, reportedly abandoned even by most of her servants who looted her house as she lay dying, and was buried in the garden of her own residence at Djoun. Her death marked the end of one of the most singular lives of any European woman of the early nineteenth century—a journey from London's political drawing rooms to self-proclaimed sovereignty in the deserts and mountains of the Ottoman Levant.