Letters from Egypt
Lucie Duff Gordon went to Egypt for her health in 1862 and stayed until her death. Her letters describe a country from the inside: household arrangements, local politics, the lives of the women she came to know, and the slow decline of her own body.
She learned Arabic and lived in a house in Luxor rather than in a hotel, which was unusual for a European woman of her class. The letters are informal and observant, and they avoid both the exoticism and the condescension common in the genre. They are also very funny about the English.
Public-domain status
First published in 1865. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Lucie Duff Gordon died in 1869, so this work has been free to republish there since 1940.
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