"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." - from I.B. Taurus http://www.ibtauris.com/ (summary taken from the book review of Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt by Katherine Frank).
"Quite simply one of the best books of the year." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Ben Downing's Queen Bee of Tuscany brings an extraordinary Victorian back to life. Born into a distinguished intellectual family and raised among luminaries such as Dickens and Thackeray, Janet Ross married at eighteen and went to live in Egypt. There, for the next six years, she wrote for the London Times, hobnobbed with the developer of the Suez Canal, and humiliated pashas in horse races. In 1867 she moved to Florence, Italy where she spent the remaining sixty years of her life writing a series of books and hosting a colorful miscellany of friends and neighbors, from Mark Twain to Bernard Berenson, at Poggio Gherardo, her house in the hills above the city. Eventually she became the acknowledged doyenne of the Anglo-Florentine colony, as it was known. Yet she was also immersed in the rural life of Tuscany: An avid agriculturalist, she closely supervised the farms on her estate and the sharecroppers who worked them, often pitching in on grape and olive harvests. Spirited, erudite, and supremely well-connected, Ross was one of the most dynamic women of her day. Her life offers a fascinating window on fascinating times, from the Risorgimento to the rise of fascism. Encompassing all this rich history, Queen Bee of Tuscany is a panoramic portrait of an age, a family, and our evolving love affair with Tuscany. A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2013
From travellers whose course of wild adventure and whose manifold and uncommon gifts put a pressure upon the reader in following them, similar to that felt by them in exploring, it is very delightful to turn to so small and readable, but fresh and pleasant a volume, as Lady Duff Gordon's. The scenes she visits and describes are supposed to be well known, but assuredly she has the merit of investing them with all interest very new, arising, principally, from her watchfulness over all human ways, and her own interest in every aspect of human life. The letters are written in a singularly captivating and vigorous English style. They possess the rare virtue of enabling the reader to realize tbe position of the writer and the true aspect of the people.
Lucie Duff Gordon was a world apart from her Victorian counterparts. An intellectual, traveller, writer and progressive social commentator, both she and her husband led an eccentric and bohemian life. This book relates the transformation she underwent as she threw off the shackles of Victorian England.
Lady Duff Gordon is the toast of Victorian London. But when her debilitating tuberculosis means exile, she and her devoted lady's maid, Sally, set sail for Egypt. It is Sally who describes, with a mixture of wonder and trepidation, the odd ménage marshalled by the resourceful Omar, which travels down the Nile to a new life in Luxor. As Lady Duff Gordon undoes her stays and takes to native dress, throwing herself into weekly salons; language lessons; excursions to the tombs; Sally too adapts to a new world, affording her heady and heartfelt freedoms never known before. But freedom is a luxury that a maid can ill-afford, and when Sally grasps more than her status entitles her to, she is brutally reminded that she is mistress of nothing.
