page_title: Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon by Henry W. Phillips (c. 1851)
context_page_description: Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon was an English author and translator who wrote as Lucie Gordon. She is best known for her Letters from Egypt, 1863–1865 and Last Letters from Egypt, most of which are addressed to her husband, Alexander Duff-Gordon, and her mother, Sarah Austin. Having moved in prominent literary circles in London, she contracted tuberculosis and migrated in 1861 to South Africa for health reasons. She travelled on to Egypt in 1862 where she settled in Luxor, learnt Arabic, and wrote many letters about Egyptian culture, religion, and customs. Her letters are notable for humour, outrage at the ruling Ottomans, and many personal stories from the people around her.
context_section_description: Lucie Austin commenced her literary life with translations, her earliest work being Barthold Niebuhr's Studies of Ancient Grecian Mythology, 1839. In 1844 she translated Wilhelm Meinhold's Mary Schweidler, the Amber Witch, a narrative dressed up as a 17th-century chronicle, and concocted to discredit rationalist methods of biblical criticism. In 1845 she published The French in Algiers, from the German and French of C. Lamping, and in 1846 Narrative of Remarkable Criminal Trials, by P. J. A. von Feuerbach. Sir Alexander Duff-Gordon, in conjunction with his wife, translated in 1847 Memoirs of the House of Brandenberg, by L. von Ranke.
  During 1850 the family resided at Weybridge, where Lady Duff-Gordon established and superintended a working-men's library and reading-room. There she translated Stella and Vanessa, a romance by A. F. L. de Wailly, and in 1853 two other works: The Village Doctor, by the Countess d'Arbouville, and Ferdinand I and Maximilian II of Austria, by L. von Ranke. To this list of translations must be added The Russians in Bulgaria and Roumelia, 1828–29, by Baron von Moltke, 1854. She edited The History and Literature of the Crusades, by H. C. L. von Sybel, in 1861.
  As a girl Lady Duff-Gordon made the acquaintance of Heinrich Heine. Lord Houghton's Monographs Personal and Social, 1873, pp. 323–32 contains an affecting narrative of her visits to the poet in Paris in 1854 shortly before his death. She went a voyage to the Cape of Good Hope in 1860 for the benefit of her health. An account of this appeared in Francis Galton's Vacation Tourist, 1862–63, pp. 119–222, under the title "Letters from the Cape".
caption: Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon by Henry W. Phillips (c. 1851)
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