She Was Already 40 When She Changed the Story of Ancient Egypt

Most people spend their fifties winding down. Amelia Edwards spent hers helping to invent a science.

By the time she turned her full attention to ancient Egypt, she had already lived several complete lives. She had been a child prodigy, a bestselling novelist, and one of the boldest travel writers of her age. What came next would earn her a title that has outlived nearly all of them: the Godmother of Egyptology.

She was born in London on June 7, 1831, the daughter of an army officer who later became a banker. Her talent showed up almost immediately. As a girl, she wrote poems and stories and drew her own illustrations for them. Her artwork was good enough that George Cruikshank, the illustrator behind some of Charles Dickens’s books, offered to take her on as a pupil. Her parents refused. Art, in their view, was beneath a respectable young woman. She became a published author anyway, by the age of fourteen.

For a while, she pursued music instead, training seriously for a career in opera, until illness damaged her throat and closed that door for good. She never fully forgave the years she felt she had wasted on it. But there were always other doors. She rode horses, shot pistols, studied mathematics, and in her twenties settled into fiction, making a real name for herself. Her novels, carefully researched and richly constructed, sold well. Barbara’s History and the chilling ghost story The Phantom Coach both appeared in 1864, and her later novel Lord Brackenbury was reprinted fifteen times to keep up with demand. She contributed to journals of the day, including Dickens’s own Household Words, and moved in circles of Victorian women who were quietly pushing for the vote.

Her closest bonds throughout her life were with women. She shared her home with Ellen Braysher for roughly thirty years, and other women also figured deeply in her story. She never made any public declaration about her private life, and much has been debated about it since, but the shape of her domestic world is clear enough from the record she left.

The money her writing brought in bought her the one thing she wanted most: the freedom to travel. In 1872, she and her companion Lucy Renshaw set off into the Dolomites, a rugged corner of the Italian Alps that had barely been mapped and was almost unknown to outsiders. Two women, on their own terms, rode side-saddle up mountain passes on mules with hired local guides, covering hundreds of miles of country that few travelers had ever crossed. She turned the journey into a book in 1873, illustrated with her own drawings. It became one of the most popular accounts ever written about the region.

Then came the trip that changed everything.

In the winter of 1873, she and Renshaw traveled to Egypt, partly to escape the rain, and boarded a dahabiyeh, a broad Nile houseboat, to sail south from Cairo toward Abu Simbel. What she saw along the river seized her completely. In 1877, she published A Thousand Miles up the Nile, an account of the voyage that was learned and vivid at once, illustrated, as always, by her own hand. It became a bestseller and changed how ordinary readers pictured Egypt.

Here is what most people miss: Amelia’s real revolution was not that she made Egypt popular. It was how she looked at it. The adventurers and showmen before her had often treated the ancient world as spectacle, something to plunder for treasure and dramatize for a paying crowd. Amelia did the opposite. She wrote down the small things, the daily texture of the place, the ordinary lives around the monuments, and she was horrified by what she watched happening to the sites: the casual theft and careless destruction of things that could never be replaced. She came home convinced that Egypt’s past did not need more looting or legends. It needed to be recorded carefully, protected, and studied like evidence. That shift in attitude, from plunder to preservation, became one of the foundations of modern archaeology.

So she spent the rest of her life making it happen. In 1882, she co-founded the Egypt Exploration Fund, an organization devoted to investigating and safeguarding ancient sites. It still exists today, now called the Egypt Exploration Society. She was tireless for it, raising enormous sums through popular articles, a mountain of letters, and lectures on both sides of the Atlantic, turning public enthusiasm into serious, methodical excavation and accurate recording of monuments.

She backed the work with her own money too, and where she put it was deliberate. She endowed Britain’s first university chair in Egyptology at University College London, choosing that institution specifically because it took women seriously as students and scholars. The chair’s first holder was Flinders Petrie, a giant of the field, who in turn trained a generation of archaeologists, among them a young man named Howard Carter, who would one day discover the tomb of Tutankhamun. The line from Amelia’s decision runs straight to one of the most famous discoveries in the history of Egyptology.

Her stamina was extraordinary. In 1889, she crossed America on a five-month lecture tour, speaking in sixteen states and giving well over a hundred talks to audiences that could number more than two thousand people at a time. When she broke her arm just hours before a lecture in Columbus, she found a surgeon, had the bone set, and went on stage anyway. American universities awarded her honorary degrees. By then, she had become one of the most respected voices on the ancient world.

She never stopped believing women belonged in that world too. She rose to become a vice president of a society campaigning for women’s suffrage and stood among a remarkable group of women travel writers, including Gertrude Bell, Isabella Bird, and Lady Anne Blunt, who refused to accept that a woman’s pen should be confined to the home and the parlour.

In 1892, she caught influenza and died on April 15 at her home in Weston-super-Mare. She was sixty. Ellen Braysher had died only months earlier, the two of them still sharing a life to the end. Amelia left her Egyptian antiquities, library, and photographs to University College London. Her grave near Bristol is marked, fittingly, by an obelisk standing over a great stone ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol for eternal life.

She was a novelist, journalist, musician, linguist, fundraiser, feminist, and explorer, and she was remarkably good at nearly all of it. The wonder is not that she did so many things, but that she began the greatest of them when most people would have called it far too late.