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Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt
Lucie Duff Gordon was a world apart from her Victorian counterparts. An intellectual, traveller, writer and progressive social commentator, she and her husband led a bohemian, eccentric and highly unconventional life in London, socialising with such luminaries as Tennyson, Dickens and Thackeray. In 1862, however, Lucie was diagnosed with tuberculosis and on the advice of her doctor, left her husband and three children to live in Egypt, where she would spend the rest of her life. Drawing on Duff Gordon's correspondence with her family, Katherine Frank elegantly relates the dramatic transformation that she underwent as she discarded the restrictions of Victorian England, shunned the English community in Cairo and immersed herself in the Egyptian way of life – ‘the real, true Arabian nights'. Lucie Duff Gordon, Noor ala Noor 'light from the source of all light' as she later became, led an exceptional, luminous life, never afraid to step outside the boundaries of convention and explore the unknown. This edition features a new Preface by [Frank].
416 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 4, 2026
No one could have imagined this exile for Lucie Austin in 1821, for Lucie Duff Gordon in 1840. But human beings, like all living things, shed chrysalises, moult, slough off old skins, metamorphose, discard and assume names, rise from heaps of cold ashes. There was no way, however, that Lucie could foresee in the summer of 1861 that her banishment would not just be healing, but transforming. South Africa would be the bridge to a different kind of wholeness, the route to another identity. When Lucie left Esher in late July, George Meredith said that 'a light had gone out'. But at her final destination in Egypt she would acquire a new name, Noor ala Noor, which means 'light from the source of all light'.
One of the most lovely and well written biographies I have ever read. I fell in love with Egypt, and I am heartbroken at the rift now between the Muslim world and the Western world that makes it likely I will never see what Lucie saw. She was so beloved there and found such beauty and joy there despite being essentially exiled to the dry climate for TB so she could live as long as possible. My grandmother died of TB decades later, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a possibility at all, to relocate to a drier climate like Arizona, was it ever suggested? She was pregnant with my uncle and refused the medications that could harm him, so it advanced during pregnancy and she died not long after his birth. They didn’t have a lot of money, but I wonder if there was a onetime conversation lost in the mist of time. It is an alternate history that shadowed my reading of this, a story of health and letters home and visits, and less deep agony in my mother. What a gift this author has given us to reintroduce Lucie and her Egypt to the world.
Alexander clearly had misgivings about the proposed trip for Lucie wrote to Sarah in late July, 'Alexander seems to doubt whether he will come, and to fear that Mossey will be bored. Was I different to other children and young people, or has the race changed? When I was that age I should have thought anyone mad who talked of a Nile voyage as possibly a bore, and would have embarked in a washing tub ... with rapture. All romance and all curiosity too seems dead and gone. Even old and sick and not very happily placed, I still cannot understand the idea of not being amused and interested. Janet says she thinks her father very unwell ... Of course, I fancy the voyage must do him good, but "one man's meat is another's poison"! and the dread of ennui is really an illness in itself to Alexander and to Janet.'
Nothing seemed to have changed in the past 500, 1,000, 6,000 years. There was the life-giving river, its banks lined with papyrus and reeds and the bullrushes where Moses had been secreted. Just beyond the river banks lay intensely green fields of beans, clover, maize and sugar-cane. In the distance, farmers followed the tracks of their ploughs; closer at hand, stolid brown oxen trudged round and round, turning the wheels which carried the Nile's water to the fields. Tall, barefoot women in black walked to the river banks, with huge clay water-jars gracefully balanced on their heads. Broad-winged egrets - so large that they looked like children's parchment kites - swooped and flew off, or stood poised, absolutely still, like birds on a Chinese screen, amidst the water reeds on the river's edge.
All this Lucie saw .* And her heart expanded within her. As the days passed, and Cairo and - more distant still – Europe were left further and further behind, it seemed as if the Zint el-Bachreyn was travelling into a heart of light and heat and life. All so familiar yet so fantastic. 'It is all a dream to me,' Lucie wrote to her mother. 'You can't think what an odd effect it is to take up an English book and read it and then to look up and hear the men cry - Yah Mohammed. "Bless thee Bottom, how art thou translated!" [sic] It is the reverse of all one's former life when one sat in England and read of the East ... [I am] in the real, true Arabian Nights, and don't know whether "I be I as I suppose I be" or not.'
Since I last wrote we got into the Southwest monsoon for one day, and I sat up by the steersman in intense enjoyment. A bright sun and glittering blue sea; and we tore along, pitching and tossing the water up like mad. It was glorious.
Oh, such a journey here! Such country! Pearly mountains and deep blue sky, and an impassable pass to walk down, and baboons and secretary birds, and tortoises. I couldn't sleep for it all last night, tired as I was with the unutterably bad road.
To those who think voyages and travels tiresome, my delight in the new birds and beasts and people must seem very stupid. I can't help it if it does, and am not ashamed to confess that I feel the old sort of enchanted wonder with which I used to read Cook's Voyages, and the like, as a child. It is very coarse and unintellectual of me; but I would rather see this now, at my age, than Italy; the fresh, new, beautiful nature is a second youth - or childhood - si vous voulez. The only drawback is the thought of you, dull and worried at home. I do wish you were here to try a day of this wild travelling. I really think it would amuse you. Tomorrow we shall cross the highest pass I have yet crossed, and sleep at Paarl - then Stellenbosch, then Cape Town. For anyone out of health and in pocket, I should certainly prescribe South Africa.
One of the most lovely and well written biographies I have ever read. I fell in love with Egypt, and I am heartbroken at the rift now between the Muslim world and the Western world that makes it likely I will never see what Lucie saw. She was so beloved there and found such beauty and joy there despite being essentially exiled to the dry climate for TB so she could live as long as possible. My grandmother died of TB decades later, and I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a possibility at all, to relocate to a drier climate like Arizona, was it ever suggested? She was pregnant with my uncle and refused the medications that could harm him, so it advanced during pregnancy and she died not long after his birth. They didn’t have a lot of money, but I wonder if there was a onetime conversation lost in the mist of time. It is an alternate history that shadowed my reading of this, a story of health and letters home and visits, and less deep agony in my mother. What a gift this author has given us to reintroduce Lucie and her Egypt to the world.
Alexander clearly had misgivings about the proposed trip for Lucie wrote to Sarah in late July, 'Alexander seems to doubt whether he will come, and to fear that Mossey will be bored. Was I different to other children and young people, or has the race changed? When I was that age I should have thought anyone mad who talked of a Nile voyage as possibly a bore, and would have embarked in a washing tub ... with rapture. All romance and all curiosity too seems dead and gone. Even old and sick and not very happily placed, I still cannot understand the idea of not being amused and interested. Janet says she thinks her father very unwell ... Of course, I fancy the voyage must do him good, but "one man's meat is another's poison"! and the dread of ennui is really an illness in itself to Alexander and to Janet.'
Nothing seemed to have changed in the past 500, 1,000, 6,000 years. There was the life-giving river, its banks lined with papyrus and reeds and the bullrushes where Moses had been secreted. Just beyond the river banks lay intensely green fields of beans, clover, maize and sugar-cane. In the distance, farmers followed the tracks of their ploughs; closer at hand, stolid brown oxen trudged round and round, turning the wheels which carried the Nile's water to the fields. Tall, barefoot women in black walked to the river banks, with huge clay water-jars gracefully balanced on their heads. Broad-winged egrets - so large that they looked like children's parchment kites - swooped and flew off, or stood poised, absolutely still, like birds on a Chinese screen, amidst the water reeds on the river's edge.
All this Lucie saw .* And her heart expanded within her. As the days passed, and Cairo and - more distant still – Europe were left further and further behind, it seemed as if the Zint el-Bachreyn was travelling into a heart of light and heat and life. All so familiar yet so fantastic. 'It is all a dream to me,' Lucie wrote to her mother. 'You can't think what an odd effect it is to take up an English book and read it and then to look up and hear the men cry - Yah Mohammed. "Bless thee Bottom, how art thou translated!" [sic] It is the reverse of all one's former life when one sat in England and read of the East ... [I am] in the real, true Arabian Nights, and don't know whether "I be I as I suppose I be" or not.'
Since I last wrote we got into the Southwest monsoon for one day, and I sat up by the steersman in intense enjoyment. A bright sun and glittering blue sea; and we tore along, pitching and tossing the water up like mad. It was glorious.
Oh, such a journey here! Such country! Pearly mountains and deep blue sky, and an impassable pass to walk down, and baboons and secretary birds, and tortoises. I couldn't sleep for it all last night, tired as I was with the unutterably bad road.
To those who think voyages and travels tiresome, my delight in the new birds and beasts and people must seem very stupid. I can't help it if it does, and am not ashamed to confess that I feel the old sort of enchanted wonder with which I used to read Cook's Voyages, and the like, as a child. It is very coarse and unintellectual of me; but I would rather see this now, at my age, than Italy; the fresh, new, beautiful nature is a second youth - or childhood - si vous voulez. The only drawback is the thought of you, dull and worried at home. I do wish you were here to try a day of this wild travelling. I really think it would amuse you. Tomorrow we shall cross the highest pass I have yet crossed, and sleep at Paarl - then Stellenbosch, then Cape Town. For anyone out of health and in pocket, I should certainly prescribe South Africa.
June 27, 2022
Just read it and found it very interesting, well researched, and very well written. I will read it again to get more out of it.
July 23, 2011
I read this excellent biography on the recommendation of my discerning colleague LMJ and she was right! It is a well-researched account of a remarkable life. Lucie Duff Gordon was an upper-middle class English woman of the mid-19th century most famous for her "Letters from Egypt", a compilation of her correspondence to family and friends from an Egypt that was then little different from how it had been for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The author examined additional existing correspondence to flesh out the whole story of Lucie's life. Three things I found especially remarkable were: a. How much Victorian Europeans of that class traipsed around the world when travel was much more arduous and time-consuming. b. The horrible death resulting from "consumption" or tuberculosis which killed so very many people of that era. c. The educational preoccupation with the acquisition of languages in earlier times and how translating books was considered an acceptable "occupation" for educated women. (Methinks that one of the things that attracted LMJ to this book was Duff Gordon's fluency and interest in all things German in her early life.) Highly recommended to biography fans, history buffs and travel fiends.
July 13, 2009
fairly obviously this is designed to remind you of Passage to India and Mrs Moore.From this aspect it's a chicken and egg scenario,did Forster know of Lucie Duff Gordon's story( he did live in Egypt for a while) or has Katherine Frank twisted things to fit Forster? I didn't really feel I got to know Lucie Duff Gordon as a person - learned a lot about what happened, but had no real feel for her character.
what struck me most was the precariousness of life at that time(mid 1800s). there seemed to be times when the family moved from one near-fatal illness to another, illnesses which today would be cured with a quick dose of antibiotics -babies,teenagers,adults and elderly all at risk. It made me realise,much more than any novel,how much we take for granted. In a novel,after all, even a pointless gratuitous death has purpose in plot development, not so in life.
what struck me most was the precariousness of life at that time(mid 1800s). there seemed to be times when the family moved from one near-fatal illness to another, illnesses which today would be cured with a quick dose of antibiotics -babies,teenagers,adults and elderly all at risk. It made me realise,much more than any novel,how much we take for granted. In a novel,after all, even a pointless gratuitous death has purpose in plot development, not so in life.
December 28, 2010
- extremely well researched & written
- fascinating insight into the lives of "upper crust" in 19th century England (amazing how many underworked members of the upper class spent decades languishing on sofas nursing vague "illnesses", occasionally moving to sofas in France or Italy)
- Lucie was such a vivacious, intelligent & unconventional woman, no wonder her history inspired a novel (Mistress of Nothing - in which she is portrayed in not as sympathetic a light as in the biography).
- fascinating insight into the lives of "upper crust" in 19th century England (amazing how many underworked members of the upper class spent decades languishing on sofas nursing vague "illnesses", occasionally moving to sofas in France or Italy)
- Lucie was such a vivacious, intelligent & unconventional woman, no wonder her history inspired a novel (Mistress of Nothing - in which she is portrayed in not as sympathetic a light as in the biography).
April 14, 2007
Even though this is obviously a biography, and often biographies end (naturally) in the death of the subject, nevertheless, it seemed such a shock when the consumption triumphed in the end, I couldn't stop myself from rather hysterically emoting. Lucie is just such a role model and inspiration.
April 5, 2012
I thought this was a well written account of an interesting life,but for my taste I would have preferred the focus to be more on Lucie Duff Gordon's time in Egypt.However the failing is perhaps mine in not looking closely enough at the description of the work beforehand, rather than in the work itself..
December 5, 2012
I loved this book!!! Lucie was such an amazing person and I can really relate with her passion for Egypt. Her favorite island Philae in the Nile was my favorite ruins to visit. Must read for anyone a fan of historical fiction or anyone who would like to catch a glimpse into a world long gone.
June 15, 2012
Remarkable Lucie Duff Gordon . Well researched . Enjoyed enough to read her Letters from Egypt .
February 12, 2020
Biography of an amazing woman
March 7, 2011
Wonderful!
August 26, 2011
I loved the subject matter but found the writing to be extremely tedious and boring.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews