Passage to Egypt: The Life of Lucie Duff Gordon

In 1862 Lucie Duff Gordon reluctantly bid farewell to her life at the center of London society and sailed to Egypt, where she fell in love with the land and the culture. One hundred and twenty-six years later, Katherine Frank boarded a flight for Cairo in search of the woman whose Letters from Egypt enchanted British readers. A Passage to Egypt recounts the life of an extraordinary Victorian woman, and her biographer’s pursuit of her.
A childhood companion of the young John Stuart Mill and the elderly Jeremy Bentham, a gifted scholar and translator, Lucie married the glamorous Alexander Duff Gordon at age eighteen and soon became the intimate friend of London’s literary lights, including Dickens, Thackeray, and Tennyson. But tuberculosis abruptly changed her life. Traveling to Egypt for its dry climate, Lucie was exiled from everything she held dear. Yet what she found there was not loss but unimagined gain, not recovery but a species of rebirth. Her Letters from Egypt are a unique testimony to the poetry, sensuality, and kindness of the land that became her spiritual home.
Like her critically acclaimed biography of Mary Kingsley, Katherine Frank’s captivating life of Lucie Duff Gordon details the evolution of an intrepid nineteenth-century heroine.