Letters from Egypt

Duff Gordon Lucie

Published by Virago, softcover, illustrated
lees/knel vouwen in omslag

Lucie Duff Gordon (1821-69), cousin of Harriet Martineau, friend of Caroline Norton, Meredith and Thackeray, went to Egypt alone in 1862 trying to rid herself of the consumption from which she eventually died in 1869. She spent these seven years in a ruined house above a temple in Luxor, on the Nile. These moving letters to her
family offer a wonderfully penetrating and sympathetic view of Egypt in the midnineteenthcentury.

The people of Luxor, officials, farmers, peasants (the fellahin), slavel, the healthy and particularly the sick (for she had rudimentary doctoring skins) flocked to her house for conversation and comfort. Her sympathy for the Arabs was in marked contrast to the attitudes of many of her fellow countrymen. 'I am in love with Arab ways, and have contrived to see and know more of family life than many Europeans who have lived here for years,' she wrote. It was a time of increasing economic chaos in Egypt, and Lucie Duff Gordon reports too on the devastation that ensued in a country where the balance between plenty and poverty was easily tilted.

When the first of her letters were published in 1865, their appeal lay largely in the image of this remarkable woman struggling with consumption in a foreign land. That poignancy remains, but they are invaluable too as a vivid account of the social upheavals in a country undergoing modernisation. Never before in paperback, this absorbing book is a valuable historical document and moving testimony to a generous and courageous woman.