Daughter of radical parents who were close friends of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill and the Carlyles, Lucie Austin was perhaps destined to follow the career path of her mother Sarah as a translator of German literature, having as a child travelled in Germany and lived for a period in France. Her marriage with minor aristocrat Alexander Duff Gordon in 1840 brought love and entry into fashionable social and literary circles if little money. However, nearly twenty years into her marriage and after having given birth to three children, Lucie discovered she had tuberculosis. In summer 1861 she set sail for South Africa, unaware that her exile ‘would be the bridge to a different kind of wholeness, the route to another identity’ (Frank 1994: 206). In the summer of 1862 she returned briefly to England but soon left for warmer climes, eventually arriving in Egypt in the autumn. She would live there until her death in 1869. There she acquired a new Egyptian household, led by her personal assistant, guide and translator Omar, which substituted her English one. Except for her married, eldest daughter Janet, who for a while came out to Alexandria, she thereafter rarely saw any of her own family. Published a year afterLetters from the Cape (1864), Letters from Egypt ‘ran through three imprints in the first year’ (Searight 1983: xii). They coincided with and helped feed a burgeoning British fascination with Egypt, and even led to their infirm author having to fend off trophy hunters from her home in Luxor in Upper Egypt (ibid, xvi).