The Project Gutenberg eBook, Letters from Egypt, by Lucie Duff Gordon,
Edited by Janet Ross

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Title: Letters from Egypt

Author: Lucie Duff Gordon

Editor: Janet Ross

Release Date: January 22, 2010 [eBook #17816]

First Posted: February 21, 2006

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LETTERS FROM EGYPT***

Transcribed from the 1902 R. Brimley Johnson edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org

Lady Duff Gordon's
Letters from Egypt

REVISED EDITION
WITH MEMOIR BY HER
DAUGHTER JANET ROSS
NEW INTRODUCTION BY
GEORGE MEREDITH

_SECOND IMPRESSION_

[Picture: Decorative symbol]

LONDON: R. BRIMLEY JOHNSON
1902

[Picture: Photograph of Lady Duff Gordon from sketch by G. F. Watts,
R.A., about 1848]

INTRODUCTION

The letters of Lady Duff Gordon are an introduction to her in person.
She wrote as she talked, and that is not always the note of private
correspondence, the pen being such an official instrument. Readers
growing familiar with her voice will soon have assurance that, addressing
the public, she would not have blotted a passage or affected a tone for
the applause of all Europe. Yet she could own to a liking for flattery,
and say of the consequent vanity, that an insensibility to it is inhuman.
Her humour was a mouthpiece of nature. She inherited from her father the
judicial mind, and her fine conscience brought it to bear on herself as
well as on the world, so that she would ask, 'Are we so much better?'
when someone supremely erratic was dangled before the popular eye. She
had not studied her Goethe to no purpose. Nor did the very ridiculous
creature who is commonly the outcast of all compassion miss having the
tolerant word from her, however much she might be of necessity in the
laugh, for Moliere also was of h