Letters from Egypt

At sunset, a tall woman in white crosses a Cairo graveyard and strides toward the desert like Hagar. Lady Lucie Duff Gordon watches her go, caught between the scene’s biblical solemnity and the bustle of a city that feels like the Arabian Nights.

In Cairo in 1862, music spills from a celebration, bargaining fills the bazaar, and ancient mosques shelter the poor. Duff Gordon, newly arrived and still troubled by a cough, relies on her servant Omar as she negotiates a boat for her Nile voyage—and finds that every courtesy and purchase reveals a society more complicated than the stories told about it. Her letters move from lively encounters and finely observed customs to the misery of families living on almost nothing. How does she make sense of a place so radiant and so painfully unequal?

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