1Amelia Edwards and Marianne Brocklehurst
It may be said of some very old places, as of some very old books, that they are destined to be forever new. The nearer we approach them, the more remote they seem: the more we study them, the more we have yet to learn. Time augments rather than diminishes their everlasting novelty; and to our descendants of a thousand years hence it may safely be predicted that they will be even more fascinating than to ourselves. This is true of many ancient lands, but of no place is it so true as of Egypt.
—Amelia B. Edwards, Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers, 1891
The Philae arrived later to Luxor than the Bagstones did. The women aboard the dahabeah Bagstones had been waiting for their travel partners for several days, but they weren’t in any rush to see the ancient sites. When the Philae finally sailed into view, Marianne Brocklehurst and her partner, Mary Booth, were lounging on the Bagstones. They gave each other a knowing look. Amelia Edwards and Lucy Renshaw were waving from the deck of the Philae as the crew prepared their boat for mooring. The ladies on the Bagstones knew in that moment that they would be sightseeing nonstop for the next week at least. As Amelia and Lucy slowly shuffled down the narrow wooden plank from the Philae to the riverbank, the plank bowed heavily under their feet. Amelia wasn’t paying attention to that, though. She was staring at the Luxor Temple, larger than life, right before her eyes.
Fig. 1.1: “The French House, Luxor,” G. Pearson (drawing published 1890).
When Amelia finally set foot in the French House, on the roof of the southern end of the Luxor Temple, and stepped into the room from where Lucie Duff Gordon had written her letters that would call so many to Luxor, she was shocked at the way the house fit in so well with its surroundings. That is to say, it was almost in ruins. She couldn’t safely climb to the balcony, washed away months ago by a strong Nile flood, but she sat in the dreary rooms with Lucie’s couch, rug, and folding chair. Amelia breathed in Lucie’s presence, inspired to impact people with her writing just as Lucie had done. In the more than four years after Lucie’s death from tuberculosis in 1869, no one else had lived in the Maison de France. It simply wasn’t safe enough to do so. The house would soon be completely destroyed when Maspero cleared the fifty feet of ancient dirt and rubble from Luxor Temple in 1885. But when Amelia and her traveling companions Lucy Renshaw, Jenny Lane, Marianne Brocklehurst, and Mary Booth were there in March 1874, they were still able to see the most valuable part of the home just as Lucie had seen it—the view. Amelia recorded in her journal for that day:
We were shocked at the dreariness of the place—till we went to the window. That window, which commanded the Nile and the western plain of Thebes, furnished the room and made its poverty splendid. The sun was near setting. We could distinguish the mounds and pylons of Medinet Habu and the site of the Ramesseum. The terraced cliffs, overtopped by the pyramidal mountain of Bab-el-Molûk, burned crimson against a sky of stainless blue. The footpath leading to the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings showed like a hot white scar winding along the face of the rocks. The river gave back the sapphire tones of the sky. I thought I could be well content to spend many a winter in no matter how comfortless a lodging, if only I had that wonderful view, with its infinite beauty of light and colour and space, and its history, and its mystery, always before my windows.1
This would be Amelia’s only trip to Egypt, so her dreams of spending many winters in this idyllic place were never to be. Much more has been written about her than probably any other woman traveler in Egypt. Amelia, the Godmother of Egyptology, is herself an institution in the discipline she helped to create.
There was nothing particular about Amelia that marked her for this role. She was a wealthy, independent British woman, and traveling to Egypt was what women like her did in those days, thanks in big part to Lucie Duff Gordon having led the way. However, it was what she did when she returned home to England that year that made her different. Amelia began a concerted effort to “save” Egypt and Egyptian monuments. To do so, she founded and helped to subsidize the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) in 1882, now the Egypt Exploration Society (EES). She trained women to take over the administration of the Fund and found men to do the excavation work. Her creation of the EEF solidified the colonial foundation of Egyptology in the West. Along with the Fund, Amelia’s journeying in Egypt and her travelogue A Thousand Miles Up the Nile professionalized Egyptology in Britain. Her money, leadership, and popular work provided the foundations for the EEF and for the new Egyptian archaeology department at University College London, and both institutions continued to sponsor scholarship about the place she loved.
Getting to Egypt
Amelia Edwards was born June 7, 1831, in London. On August 12, she was christened Amelia Anna Blanford Edwards at St. John the Baptist Parish in Hoxton, Middlesex. She was an only child. Her father, Thomas, was a former military officer and banker, and her Irish mother, Alicia, wanted her to have a good education and cultivated her early interest in art, music, and literature. Amelia had an education similar to Lucie Duff Gordon’s in early Victorian Britain, which is to say she was educated at home in the subjects most girls weren’t taught at the time, like philosophy and literature.
By the time she was twenty, at her core, Amelia was lonely and wanted companionship. To this end, she had accepted the proposal of a Mr. Bacon, who she knew loved her very much. She thought about his steady devotion to her as she readied herself to meet him on a cool spring day in 1851. Suddenly her stomach lurched. As she ran to the privy for the umpteenth time that morning, she realized that she wasn’t physically ill. The problem with her nervous stomach was her. She appreciated, but could not bring herself to return, Mr. Bacon’s feelings. Amelia respected him and liked him very much. She knew he was a good man with good prospects for a future, but she didn’t think her level of esteem for him was enough to make a happy marriage, much less a happy engagement. She wanted something more than Mr. Bacon, someone different. It took her some time, but Amelia finally called off the engagement by the end of the year, ready to move on with her life and her writing.
In 1860, when Amelia was just twenty-nine, both of her parents died within a week of each other. It may have been illness, old age, or a combination of both. Her father was seventy-two; her mother was sixty-eight. She was close to both of her parents, and she now felt that she was alone in the world. As the only child and heir, she inherited the entire estate. It wasn’t much money, but she had been very successful in her work up to that point, writing popular books such as The Ladder of Life (1856), My Brother’s Wife (1857), Hand and Glove (1858), and Barbara’s History (1864). So, in combination with her literary income, the inheritance was enough to make sure she could live comfortably. In her grief, she turned to a longtime family friend named Ellen Braysher. Ellen was thirty years older than Amelia, but the two were very close. Amelia had been staying intermittently with Ellen and her family in London for the previous five years, before her parents had died. By 1861, Amelia had moved in with them somewhat permanently, finding herself a home and companionship.
After the sudden and surprising deaths of Ellen’s husband, John, in 1863 and her daughter, Sarah, in 1864, the grieving women moved out of their old London house and bought a home near Bristol, in Westbury-on-Trym, that they called the Larches. Here they lived, together, for the next twenty-eight years. The relationship between Ellen Braysher and Amelia was, to some, like mother and daughter, which may have been true. Others say they were lovers. Each of them, at the very least, had had intimate relationships with other women. Their devotion to each other lasted until their deaths. Ellen was often ill, and Amelia would race home to care for her. In letters she referred to Ellen as “my invalid,” and, in 1865, Amelia dedicated a book of poems, entitled Ballads, to “my most beloved friend, Ellen Braysher.” By this point, Amelia had fully embraced the fact that Ellen herself was Amelia’s own place of refuge. Ellen’s role as Amelia’s love, support, and safety gave Amelia the unbounded freedom she had always wanted in her life but never had. She was free to travel, free to write and be professionally productive, and free to meet, woo, and love other like-minded women.
They settled into their new home at Westbury-on-Trym, and Amelia became acquainted, and fell in love, with several women. Amelia’s main biographers, Joan Rees and Brenda Moon, each say that Amelia’s passionate friendships hint at “the possibility of lesbianism” but that her “attachments to other women is not susceptible of easy labelling.”2 This is true, especially of women in this period. Amelia might not have called herself a lesbian, but she was physically affectionate in her relationships with women, and her writings were full of adoration.
In 1871, after reeling from two recent severe heartbreaks, Amelia was ready for a change of scene and a change of air. Leaving one’s home in search of fresh air to cure any disease had been the practice of well-to-do Europeans since the Romans made their sea-voyage cure popular in the first centuries of the common era.3 The idea was to leave the old, stale miasma (bad air) for new, fresh, good air either in the countryside, on the Continent, in the mountains, in the desert, or at sea. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the sea-voyage cure was popular among tuberculosis sufferers in Britain who could afford the time and expense of being away from home. Later, the cure was deemed useful to anyone in need of relief from heartbreak, heartburn, and everything in between.
The change-of-air cure, Amelia knew, worked not just for lungs but also for hearts. She soon left for a trip to Rome on her own to meet friends, leaving Ellen safely at home. She traveled to Rome and remained there for the winter of 1871–72 to cure her broken heart, or at the very least find someone to help her mend it. By April of 1872, she had moved on to Salerno, a beautiful seaside town on the west coast of Italy, just southeast of Naples. There she met Lucy Renshaw for the first time.
Fig. 1.2: Amelia Edwards, c. 1890.
Like that of many women in this period, Lucy’s life is hidden from us, before her time in Egypt. She was born July 30, 1833, just two years after Amelia, and was equally as adventurous. Lucy was from Hulme, within Greater Manchester, in northern England, and was from a family even more financially well-to-do than Amelia.4 During the Industrial Revolution, the town of Hulme exploded with cotton mills and textile manufacturing. Lucy’s father, John, was part of a wealthy area family; her mother, Maria Sarah Capes, was ten years younger than her husband.5 Lucy grew up in a large house on Boundary Lane, with several servants in the household.6 By 1871, Lucy was thirty-seven, and, like Amelia, both her mother and father had died. She continued living in the Oxford Street house she and her father had moved to in Manchester at least ten years before.7 Lucy had four servants and her father’s money; her life was relatively comfortable.8
Fig. 1.3: Lucy Renshaw, c. 1874, from Amelia’s photo album.
When they met in Salerno, Amelia felt a kinship with Lucy, and she soon found that Lucy would travel with her to the most untrodden and unfrequented places. Their first destination together was the Dolomite region of Italy, where few British travelers had ever gone. Both women had dreamed of going to the alpine region, to get to know the mountains and people intimately, and to sketch, draw, and climb to their hearts’ content. They had men as guides and donkeys for riding, but otherwise it was Lucy and Amelia, and Lucy’s maid, whom we only know by the letter S.9 Amelia and Lucy, being of heartier stock (or so they thought), considered S too delicate for the path they would be taking. S had a tendency to complain and ended up holding them back, so she didn’t last long on the journey.
The whole time they were in Italy, they only ran into three groups of English travelers. Being such outsiders, Lucy and Amelia were never allowed to forget that they were unmarried, pitied by all they met. Near the end of their journey, they approached the village of Selva. They had been traveling by donkey for over eight hours through rough terrain, and everyone was exhausted to their bones. The women who owned the village’s inn watched the group on their approach. They sent the donkeys to be fed, their guides to eat and drink, and Lucy and Amelia to rest and wash. The innkeepers were shocked that two women, traveling alone in an isolated area, did so without husbands. They asked so many questions of Lucy and Amelia—were they sisters? No. Were they married? No, they laughed, neither of them were married. This answer received a chorus of “Poverine! Poverine!” Lucy and Amelia, for all of their adventure, were “poor little things,” traveling all alone.10 They didn’t feel so alone with each other.
In the Dolomites, the two cemented their relationship as a couple just a few short months after they had met.11 Amelia, it seemed, had recovered from her broken heart. In this period, it was easier for two women to travel together—much like Lucie Duff Gordon did with her maid Sally Naldrett—than it would have been for them to have adventures on their own. In July of 1872, possibly at the end of their Italian journey, Amelia gave a copy of Ballads to Lucy, the very book she had dedicated to Ellen. In it, the lovestruck poet had inscribed two poems in her own hand, addressed “To Lucy Renshaw.” One was an older poem, possibly meant for a past lover. The second one was new and likely written just for Lucy, entitled “On the Rose She Gave Me.”
I hold in my hand the rose you wore
Last night in your bosom—its perfume shed,
The faint, sweet blush of its beauty fled
Like the bloom from the lips of a maiden dead;—
—a rose no more!
Rock’d on thy heart as it rose & fell,
For thy sake forgetting the sun & the dew,
Breathing thy breath the long ev’ning through,
What it felt, what it saw, what it dream’d, what it knew,
Who shall tell?
Turn’d it pale, do you think, for the wild, brief bliss
Of loving those treasures near which it lay
(Twin blossoms that know not the light of day)
Which I would barter my soul away
But to kiss?
Oh, that the fate of the rose were mine!
Just for one night in thy bosom to lie—
For just that one night in thy bosom, to die,
Yielding life, love, song, in one long sigh
Were divine!12
Broken relationships had pushed Amelia to Italy, but a loving partnership would spur her “most exciting and productive journeys.” Those journeys were with Lucy, traveling around Italy, Egypt, and the Middle East in late 1873.13
After they returned to England, Amelia published her travelogue of the trip, Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys: A Midsummer Ramble in the Dolomites (1873), her first travel book. Lucy appeared as a companion, known as L., “for briefness,” but for the next fifteen years, she was a devoted partner to Amelia during numerous trips. Both women had proven their traveling prowess by riding into and through places where few British travelers had ever gone, and they lived to tell about it. Untrodden Peaks wasn’t a trusty Baedeker’s guidebook containing information about costs, exchange rates, and amenities along the way. It could be better compared to Lucie Duff Gordon’s Letters from Egypt in both purpose and impact. Untrodden Peaks was good for armchair travel and for showing women they could travel alone, unmarried, in the Italian countryside. Most importantly, it showed them how to do it. With Amelia’s relaxed humor and practical, if vague, travel advice, the book was an instant success. And the process of writing it—romping with her dear friend and the freedom this afforded—gave Amelia such pleasure that she was prompted to start another one like it. And she wanted to do it with Lucy.
Fig. 1.4: Jenny Lane, c. 1876.
At the beginning of 1873, the women were back in England. Amelia was with Ellen at the Larches working on the proofs for Untrodden Peaks. Lucy was back home trying to find another maid—one hardier and sturdier than S, which wouldn’t be hard to do. She hired a new maid, named Jane—later known by her nickname Jenny—Lane. Jenny was the linchpin to their plans, as companions so often were for Amelia. By October, the women were back on the Continent for another winter abroad, leaving Ellen at home. They had begun, Amelia claimed, with just Europe in mind, but their plans quickly changed.
A Journey of a Thousand Miles
Jenny Lane was born in either April or May of 1833 or 1835, making her around the same age as Lucy and Amelia.14 According to a note kept with her diaries, now in the Griffith Institute at Oxford, Jenny was the daughter of George Lane, a gardener in Sussex. She may have been part of the domestic staff at Lucy’s father’s home, and being young, single, and generally healthy, she would have made a good traveling maid.15 After she returned from the trip with Amelia and Lucy in 1874, Jenny was married twice.16 She didn’t have children, but she had a niece, in whose possession her journals remained until they were purchased by the Griffith Institute in 2018. Jenny’s diaries are the only record we have of her participation in this journey through France and up the Nile. The journals contain the only memories passed down to us about the women’s time before the group arrived in Cairo as well as after they left Egypt, so they are a crucial record.
The three women started from England on September 4, 1873, crossing the Channel and making their way through France by train, on horse, and on foot. The farther south they went, the more the sun shone and the hotter they got. Jenny thought it was funny to see the local residents struck still like statues, gawking as the heavily dressed women walked by, clearly uncomfortable in their clothes in the heat. Jenny especially liked to get out of the hotels for some walking when the weather allowed it, but it took some time to get used to both the warmer temperatures and the exercise. But she did, quickly, and keeping up with Amelia and Lucy would be her goal for the rest of the trip.
It wasn’t on a whim or by accident that they decided to go to Egypt, as Amelia so famously claimed in her bestselling A Thousand Miles Up the Nile. In fact, it took forethought and quite a bit of planning to get to Egypt, which Lucy had started to do while enjoying the nice weather in the South of France at the end of October. However, the weather was unpredictable at times, and when it turned again, the puddles and rain brought the mosquitoes. Jenny scratched the bites on her face as she looked in the mirror, turning this way and that. Her skin was spotted, red, and blotchy; it looked like a plum pudding. She was ready to leave the small southern French town of Nîmes, regardless of whether the sun came out again. She needed to escape the bugs. Amelia and Lucy, hoping to stay a little longer, had simply wanted to spend some time outside sketching the landscapes as they had done in the Dolomites the year before. Excepting that first week in Nîmes, when the weather was nice, the whole excursion had been a disaster. Washed out of the hills, nearly drowned on the plains, and soaked to the bone, these women of means set their plans in place and left for Egypt.17
They made their way from southern France to Brindisi, taking days to reach this port town on the north side of the Italian bootheel. There the women boarded a small steamer, the Simla, with about one hundred other passengers the night before it was due to leave. At 5:00 A.M., November 24, 1873, on what would be a bright morning with a calm sea, the boat left Brindisi. They looked forward to smooth sailing, but these winter trips across the Mediterranean were rarely calm. By the next day, it was obvious that the wind and rain would make for a rough passage. Each night the passengers had to struggle even to stay in bed due to the tossing and turning of the boat. During the day they were hardly able to roam about the decks for fear of falling overboard. Thanks to the rough waters, the Simla went off course by a hundred miles or so, so they had to readjust their route to make it to port. By the time they arrived at Alexandria, at noon on Thursday the twenty-seventh, the passengers were happy they could spend their mandatory forty-eight-hour quarantine in the calm waters of the harbor, their boat’s mast marked with the familiar yellow flag.
During the quarantine, now that they were not battling the rolling sea, Jenny thought that life on the boat was wonderfully relaxing. All around her in the water she could see other boats with their yellow flags. She enjoyed the bright sun and warm breezes, and she could see Pompey’s Pillar rising above its surroundings in town. Jenny compared the weather to a warm English summer—very different from France.
Copyright © 2024 by Kathleen Sheppard
