As a contemporary of the great Victorians who lived and wrote during the golden age of European Orientalism, Lady Lucie Duff Gordon occupied a unique position among her contemporaries. She was an independent thinker whose scorn of conventionality was equaled only by her love of honesty. Her writing career falls into two phases: in the first, from 1844 to 1861, she published ten translations, mostly of German historical works and essays. In the second, from 1861 until her death in 1869, she lived abroad when her consumptive debilities forced her to leave England. From South Africa and Egypt she then wrote letters home that rendered her experience of the two cultures with a brilliance and sympathy that led her family to publish them.

Her first two works, "Letters from the Cape" (1864, republished as a volume only in 1921) and Letters from Egypt, 1863-65 (1865) were very popular, "reaching a far wider public than her...