’Lady Duff Gordon’s printed works were many.  She was an excellent German scholar, and had the advantage in her translations from that difficult language of her labours being shared by her husband.  Ranke, Niebuhr, Feuerbach, Moltke, and others, owe their introduction to our English-reading public to the industry and talent of her pen.  She was also a classic scholar of no mean pretensions.  Perhaps no woman of our own time, except Mrs. Somerville and Mrs. Browning in their very different styles, combined so much erudition with so much natural ability.  She was the daughter of Mr. Austin, the well-known professor of jurisprudence, and his gifted wife, Sarah Austin, whose name is familiar to thousands of readers, and whose social brilliancy is yet remembered with extreme admiration and regret by the generation immediately preceding our own.

’That Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, inherited the best of the intellect and qualities of both these parents will, we think, hardly be disputed, and she had besides, of her own, a certain generosity of spirit, a widespread sympathy for humanity in general, without narrowness or sectarianism, which might well prove her faith modelled on the sentence which appeals too often in vain from the last page of the printed Bible to resenting and dissenting religionists, “Multae terricolis linguae, coelestibus una."’

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The last two years of my mother’s life were one long struggle against deadly disease.  The last winter was cheered by the presence of my brother, but at her express desire he came home in early summer to continue his studies, and my father and I were going out to see her, when the news came of her death at Cairo on July 14, 1869.  Her desire had been to be among her ‘own people’ at Thebes, but when she felt she would never see Luxor again, she gave orders to be buried as quietly as possible in the cemetery at Cairo.  The memory of her talent, simplicity, stately beauty, and extraordinary eloquence, and her almost passionate pity for any oppressed creature, will not easily fade.  She bore great pain, and what was almost a greater trial, absence from her husband, her little daughter Urania, and her many friends, uncomplainingly, gleaning what consolation she could by helping her poor Arab neighbours, who adored her, and have not, I am told, forgotten the ‘Great Lady’ who was so good to them.

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The first volume of Lady Duff Gordon’s ‘Letters from Egypt’ was published by Messrs. Macmillan and Co. in May, 1865, with a preface by her mother, Mrs. Austin, who edited them, and was obliged to omit much that might have given offence and made my mother’s life uncomfortable—­to say the least—­in Egypt.  Before the end of the year the book went through three editions.

In 1875 a volume containing the ‘Last Letters from Egypt,’ to which were added ‘Letters from the Cape,’ reprinted from ‘Vacation Tourists’ (1864), with a Memoir of my mother by myself, was published by Messrs. Macmillan and Co.  A second edition appeared in 1876.