Edwards had real talent and sang at concerts to ringing applause and flowers tossed to her feet. She wrote compositions that received flattering “testimonials” from the critics. She was even employed as an organist for a spell, and her career was seemingly launched. But she eventually realized that her musical abilities were good but not sublime. She knew that her genius lay elsewhere and suspected it might be lurking in the inkbottle. She got to writing and received her first payment, at age twenty-two, for the publication of her story “Annette” in 1853. Once she realized she could earn a living by words, her path forward was lit as if by blaze.
Writing became her life’s purpose; it was her very nature. When interviewed about how she came to writing as a profession, Edwards explained her lifelong passion for it and even went so far as to take credit for having “anticipated the typewriter.” Not for inventing it, just for having a hunch that a writing machine was coming. She had a gut feeling that technology would someday have to catch up with her prolific output.
Edwards’s childhood hobby of creating poems and little stories steadily transformed itself into a life of journalism, literary essays, romantic tales, ghost stories, magazine articles, and surprisingly, for such an atypical Victorian woman, who some said couldn’t even make a cup of tea, books on social etiquette and a ballroom guide. Her novels were widely recommended as great “railway reading,” the equivalent of today’s “good book for the plane,” and they went through numerous editions and translations. She was finding success in print and, for a woman of twenty-four years, significant financial independence to boot.
IN 1860, EDWARDS’S MOTHER AND FATHER died within a week of each other. They were hardly lovebirds, and it was odd as well as tragic that both parents should drop out of Edwards’s life at the same time. She was only thirty when they died.
Edwards was without any real attachments at that point. She had a cousin she didn’t get along with very well (also a writer, whom Edwards did not like to be confused with), and she was, technically, now a spinster. She had been briefly engaged nine years earlier but had found her suitor, Mr. Bacon, to be wanting. She noted that the engagement was not a happy one; they were ill suited and though Mr. Bacon proclaimed his love for Amelia, she could not genuinely reciprocate the feeling. She had accepted him out of esteem and a sense of duty and found these reasons insufficient to rationalize an entire life spent together. At least she was clear. She broke off their wedding plans with relief.
Being a free agent, perhaps much more so than she ever wished, Edwards went to live with old family friends, Mr. and Mrs. Braysher, in Kensington. The arrangement lasted the rest of her life until, almost ironically, thirty-two years later, Edwards and Mrs. Braysher died within weeks of each other.
After Mr. Bacon, Edwards never engaged a suitor again and never married. She didn’t want to. She never felt romantic love for a man, though she did feel love, very much, for some of her women friends. Three women occupied her heart over the years: Marianne North, the famed botanical artist; Lucy Renshaw; and Kate Bradbury. One can only speculate whether or not Edwards was a lesbian (it does seem likely), but to be sure, she held her lady friends in very deep affection, loved them with devotion, and attributed much of her life’s happiness to their companionship. To one, she gifted a gold ring. To another, she sent sketches addressed to her dear “poo Owl” and sometimes just to “Baby.” A great sweetness in Amelia’s life, perhaps the very greatest, was the women in her life.
Her friendship with Marianne North began shortly after the death of Edwards’s parents and in mutual admiration—both women were independent, adventurous, clever, and accomplished. Yet over the course of a decade the relationship grew somewhat tortured for Edwards. The extent of her affection for North was not mutual, and it came to be seen by North as too much, too intense. Letters between the two women gathered in emotion and heat, revealing Edwards’s desire to keep her friend close and the pullback from North as she gently dodged Edwards’s reach and made plans to travel the world in search of exotic flowers to paint. Although the two did remain friends for life, stoking each other’s fame and careers (almost politely), the intimacy of their friendship was diminished and Edwards was gutted by it. A phase of deep melancholy followed, and several illnesses slowed Edwards down. She entered a depression, one where in her darkest hours she lamented, “My heart no longer beats faster at the sight of a new or kindly & beautiful face. I hope nothing from it.”9 Melancholia haunted Edwards for much of her life. The arrival of her new friend “L” was, however, about to blow a giant new gale of happiness into things.
LUCY RENSHAW WAS the famous “L” mentioned in Edwards’s travel accounts and books. Together, the two ladies embarked on some big adventures, beginning with Italy’s famous Dolomites, a section of steep peaks in the Alps, and culminating in Egyptian sands. Edwards describes how they had “done some difficult walking in their time, over ice and snow, on lave cold and hot, up cinder-slopes and beds of mountain torrents . . .”10and they clearly shared an appetite for robust expeditions. Yet, in spite of all the frequent mention made of “L,” Miss Renshaw is an unknowable figure. Details of her story are scant, some photographs of her are uncertain (in one—if it is indeed her— she’s sporting short-cropped hair, a cravat, shadow-brushed sideburns, and a man’s jacket!11), and the things that can be said about her add up to simple summations. We know, for example, that Lucy was two years younger than Edwards; she sometimes wore a crimson shawl and according to Edwards was “given to vanities in the way of dress”12 ; she had a nurse’s instinct; and she was very practical, capable, and certainly up for an adventure or two. She also liked to pet and feed the caged rabbits on board the dahabeeyah, all of which were awaiting their day in the kitchen pot. The details are slight; there’s not much more to be had. Yet one thing does come into sharp focus thanks to Edwards’s literary flair: Lucy and Amelia were the two women who had arrived fresh from Alexandria in 1873, after forty-eight hours of quarantine, to Shepherd’s Hotel in Cairo:
Where every fresh arrival has the honour of contributing, for at least a few minutes, to the general entertainment, the first appearance of L. and the Writer [Amelia Edwards], tired, dusty, and considerably sun-burned, may well have given rise to some comments in usual circulation at those crowded tables. People asked each other, most likely, where these two wandering Englishwomen had come from; why they had not dressed for dinner; what brought them to Egypt; and if they were going up the Nile . . .13
The two disheveled ladies caused a stir, especially with sunburned faces in the age of creamy complexions. Famously, these lady travelers were in Egypt simply to find fair weather and cloudless skies. Edwards, however, was smart and knew how to shape her own tale. She was out to explore matters of archaeological interest too.
Under pale, hot skies, with a sketch pad in one hand, a parasol in the other, Edwards directed her crew and boat-bound companions to tour every archaeological site situated on the banks of the Nile. True to her Victorian sensibilities, she kept house in her dahabeeyah, the Philae—flowers always on the table, fresh brown bread to eat, tea in the afternoon, and a chaise longue on the deck; she rarely roughed it. Camelback rides were a thing designed, in her opinion, to kill a person; she had identified the four paces of a camel as: “a short walk, like the rolling of a small boat in a chopping sea; a long walk which dislocates every bone in your body; a trot that reduces you to imbecility; and a gallop that is sudden death.”14
Edwards’s appreciation of the Egyptian landscape is woven throughout the book that resulted from her travels up and down that glorious river, A Thousand Miles Up the Nile. Her account was a wild bestseller in the nineteenth century, and it’s still in print today. She knew it was her best. In it she chronicles her days on the floating dahabeeyah, the open markets that smelled of cardamom and clove where a stall of bright red shoes was tucked beside withered old ladies in black robes. The women could tell you your fortune and sell you dates and oranges or perhaps sell you an entirely different fruit born of Egyptian soil: artifacts like fragments of pottery or pieces of bone.
ABOVE : The Pyramids of Giza, circa 1890
Edwards