In spite of this hardship, Edwards was the voice for Egyptology. Her knowledge of the field was vast and expert, and she was about to emerge from whatever obscurity she felt to face the world in an unprecedented manner. She had a plan, a big one.
But first there was Kate. Kate Bradbury was the energetic thirty-four-year-old woman who doted on Edwards and looked after her. It was because of this trusted bond (and the need for some money) that Edwards embarked on an ambitious lecture series in America in 1889. With Kate there to help her, she put her strong understanding of current archaeology in Egypt into motion and claimed a piece of the fame that was deservedly hers.
With jittery nerves and a streak of genuine panic, Edwards still proved to be a public-speaking phenomenon. Her lectures weren’t attended by just a handful of spectacle-wearing, gray-haired men; thousands came, both because of Edwards’s reputation as a scholar and because of the public’s fascination with the subject. Over two thousand people attended her first lecture, titled “The buried cities of ancient Egypt.”29 Reporters rushed to greet her; newspapers announced her arrival in each city; ladies’ societies and other organizations welcomed her to their luncheons as a celebrity. A collection of her lectures makes up the book Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers (1891), published posthumously.
Just as her writing combined scholarship with wit and an easy narrative, Edwards’s lectures simultaneously entertained and educated. This was always the beauty of her work. Probably her greatest contribution to archaeology was that of “bridge.” She was the mechanism that connected field experience and the solid understanding of a science and its achievements with the enviable twist of popular appeal. What made her books sell is the same thing that made people subscribe in droves to the Egypt Exploration Fund. Edwards had the rare gift of making archaeology not only accessible to the general public, but also absolutely fascinating.
THE AMERICAN LECTURE tour schedule was demanding. Even by today’s travel standards, she was on a circuit that would exhaust anyone: 120 lectures in less than a year. Kate was beat, and Edwards seemed to be running on the fumes of glory alone. Things began to slow down for her when she fell and broke her arm and soon afterwards began a battle with breast cancer. She underwent a successful operation to remove the malignant tumor, but her health declined anyway. Edwards continued to lecture even as her health dwindled. Each new lecture offered a chance to spark renewed vigor, but Edwards couldn’t keep it up. She died in April 1892.
By the time of her death Edwards had been awarded three honorary degrees, from Columbia University, Smith College, and the College of the Sisters of Bethany in Topeka, Kansas. Her will stipulated that her entire library and all of her artifacts, engravings, sketches, and more should go to support the Edwards Chair of Egyptology. To this end she also gave £5,000 (a fortune then) to fund the Chair at University College London and made clear whom she wanted to be appointed. The recipient had to be under the age of forty, and so no one working at the British Museum could be considered for the role. In this way, Edwards cleverly guaranteed that only Flinders Petrie could get the job.30 Meanwhile, her cherished Kate, her “poo Owl,” went on to marry a professor of Egyptology at Oxford University, Francis Llewellyn Griffith. With Edwards as her mentor, one has to wonder who had the better conversation: the professor or his very learned wife.
WHAT WAS IT about archaeology, and more specifically Egyptology, that attracted Edwards so strongly? She had a successful career and, had she desired it, could have written romance novels until she was old and gray, made loads of money, traveled widely, seen it all. With her appetite for adventure, Edwards might have made a whole life out of simply traveling the world, observing first-class digs, checking off a list of archaeological sites to visit like groceries to buy. Instead, she decided to get involved. She fought for archaeology, for its development, expansion, and cause. Her instinct for archaeology can be traced back to her girlhood desire to write about bygone times when all was “love & fighting.” Amelia Edwards was a romantic. For her, the past was a great canvas and archaeology her palette. Her imagination could move all over that canvas—spanning thousands of years—filling it in with detail and antiqued color, sketching people, events, and monuments of wondrous, sacred quality. As a writer, Edwards approached archaeology through a highly emotional lens. In the beginning she chose archaeology as a way of life because the ancient world provided a backdrop to the stories she loved most. Ancient Egypt was home to pharaohs and kings. A lost time. A day of golden tombs and falcons. She reveled in it.
Later that love grew into something more concrete, a little less fanciful. Edwards’s fascination with archaeology moved towards a concerted effort to preserve the past. To lose evidence of Egypt’s history—that beauty she both saw and imagined—or to leave pieces of it buried and poorly excavated, was a crime she could not condone. Amelia Edwards, grand dame of the Nile, uniquely embodied romance and practicality in her approach to history’s ruins. Without her, archaeology might have remained as dry as the very bones it unearths.
ABOVE : Dieulafoy, famous for her cross-dressing, easily and often mistaken for a young man
ALL DRESSED UP In a Man’s Suit
Hair cropped mannishly short, a board strapped beneath her white linen shirt, and a red ribbon looped through the buttonhole of her well-cut suit jacket, Jane Dieulafoy embraced la vie de l’homme. In a day when new brides were expected to tuck into homemaking, to fluff the nest and prepare for babies to arrive, the Dieulafoys began their marriage in a radically different way. Shortly after their wedding, Jane Dieulafoy dressed herself convincingly as a boy and fought as a front-line solider alongside her husband, Marcel, during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. She camped with the men, never revealing her identity as a woman, and trekked with the army of the Loire through harsh conditions and definite danger.
Later, as her interest in archaeology blossomed and her explorations in the field took her to what is now Iran, she adopted the dress of a western man completely. Forsaking the ruffled petticoat, Dieulafoy was one of the first European women to slip into a pair of pants. In doing so she became something of celebrity in nineteenth-century Paris where she was both admired and mocked. She never went back to women’s clothing. Her cross-dressing had something of a Charlie Chaplin effect; she looked a touch comic in pictures and sketches yet completely put together and fashionable, her shirt buttoned high up her neck, waistcoat snug, trousers perfectly tailored, black shoes laced and polished.
Through her writings, personal and published, it’s evident that Dieulafoy was bored by Victorian society. She longed to “pass the days and ease the burden”1 of the bourgeois life she was born into, and only upon returning from exhausting field excavations did she allow herself to be fêted by salon society. Hardships of the field were washed away with disinfectant soap and champagne, while the artifacts she and Marcel acquired abroad significantly enriched the collections of the Louvre Museum. Perhaps one of their most famous finds, the Lion Frieze at Susa, spurred both public wonder and long ticket lines. Its discovery was something of a miracle after weeks of bad weather and poor luck.
When she wasn’t on site, Dieulafoy was a prolific travel writer. By virtue of her pen, she was able to leave Parisian life and daily humdrum to roam desert dunes and ancient tells again. She invited the men and women of France to join her on those journeys, bringing the exoticism of the Orient and the feel of camelback sojourns into their reading rooms. Her life of adventure is what led the New York Times to refer to her as the lady “regarded as the most remarkable woman in France and