Люси Гордон: Англиялық жазушы және Египет хаттарының авторы

English author and translator (1821 1869)
the fashion designer and Titanic survivor

Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon ( Austin; 24 June 1821 – 14 July 1869) was an English author and translator who wrote as Lucie Gordon. She is best known for her Letters from Egypt, 1863–1865 (1865) and Last Letters from Egypt (1875), 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 travelled 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.

Lucie Austin was born on 24 June 1821, in Queen Square, Westminster, to John Austin (1790–1859), a jurist, and his wife, Sarah Austin, a translator. Lucie's father was a professor of jurisprudence and a noted intellectual while her mother was well educated for a woman of the time, used to discussing politics on an equal footing with men. Her parents' only child, her chief playfellows were her first cousin Henry Reeve, and the teenage John Stuart Mill. Inheriting her parents' talents Lucie developed a strong love of reading and as she grew in vigour and in sense, she developed a strong tinge of originality and independence, with a marked love of animals. Her childhood included the elderly Jeremy Bentham (who had founded Utilitarianism) take her around his garden in an activity they called "ante prandial circumgyration". In 1826 she went with her parents to Bonn on the Rhine, and stayed sufficiently long enough to return speaking fluent German. She had scant regular instruction, but was for a short time at a mixed school of boys and girls kept by George Edward Biber at Hampstead, where she learnt Latin. By the age of 13 she was reading the "Odyssey" in the original. She also kept her pet snake twined into her plaited hair, and was thought to be "un peu unmanageable" by her mother and "a potential homicide" by a friend of the family. Lucie was allowed to meet and walk out alone with Duff Gordon. One day he said to her: "Miss Austin, do you know people say we are going to be married?". Annoyed at being talked of, and hurt at his brusque way of mentioning it, she was just going to give a sharp answer, when he added: "Shall we make it true?" to which she replied with the monosyllable "Yes". The couple were married on 16 May 1840 in Kensington Old Church, despite the initial objections by the groom's mother over Lucie's lack of a dowry
Following her marriage at the age of 18, Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon continued with translating and various other writing projects. The couple lived at 8 Queen Square, Westminster, a house with a statue of Queen Anne at one end, since renumbered as 15 Queen Anne's Gate. Here a remarkable circle of friends and acquaintances often met. Lord Lansdowne, Lord Monteagle, Caroline Norton, Dickens, Thackeray, Elliot Warburton, Tom Taylor, Tennyson, Alexander Kinglake, and Henry Taylor were habitués, and every foreigner of talent and renown looked upon the house as a centre of interest. On one occasion Leopold von Ranke was among the visitors. A noted character in the establishment in Queen Square was a Nubian boy called Hassan el Bakkeet, who had been enslaved before being rescued by English missionaries. He had then obtained a position as a servant but after he was threatened with blindness his employer had sacked him. As he had occasionally delivered messages to Queen Square, he found his way, as he explained, 'to die on the threshold of the beautiful pale lady.' He was found crouching on Lady Duff Gordon's doorstep one night, when she was returning from a theatrical party at Charles Dickens's home. She took el Bakkeet in, had his eyes treated and his condition cured. He became known as Hatty, and was employed as Lady Duff Gordon's devoted servant and well known to visitors. He was also a playmate to her daughter Janet, to the horror of a visiting American author, a Mr. Hilliard, who asked Lady Duff Gordon how she could let a negro touch her child, whereupon she called Janet and Hatty to her, and kissed each of them. Hatty contracted consumption and died in the Westminster Hospital in 1850. As her parents had settled in Weybridge the Duff Gordons spent some summers with them. The house was cold and damp, which lead Janet Duff Gordon to attribute her mother's later bad health to the incessant colds she caught there. While living at Weybridge in 1850 Lady Duff Gordon established and superintended a working men's library and reading room. Following the birth of her son Maurice in 1849, Lady Duff Gordon began to succumb to tuberculosis and by the winter of 1861 she had become so ill that her doctors advised her to travel to a warmer, drier climate. After trying Ventnor for two winters, she went on a voyage to the Cape of Good Hope in 1860. An account of this appeared in Francis Galton's Vacation Tourist, 1862–63, pp.119–222, under the title "Letters from the Cape".

Upon her return to England, she was persuaded to go to Eaux Bonnes in the autumn of 1862, which negatively affected her health. Lady Duff Gordon then decided to visit the newly fashionable Egypt, leaving her husband and children behind in England. While she was familiar with the country from reading Herodotus, the Bible, Arabian Nights and Alexander William Kinglake's Eothan, they hadn't prepared her for the realities of modern Egypt when she disembarked in Alexandria in October 1862. She noted "what is not pleasant is the absence of all brightness or gaiety, even from young and childish faces." Despite this she made Egypt her home for the rest of her life with the exception of two short visits to England in 1863 and 1865. Open to other cultures and a supporter of working class politics in the United Kingdom, Lady Duff Gordon's sympathies were with the hard working fellahin (peasantry) of Egypt. During the first years of her residence on the Nile she wrote numerous letters to her family, in which she gave vivid descriptions of Eastern life and many details of domestic manners and customs. These were collected and edited by her mother Sarah Austin and published as Letters from Egypt, 1863–1865 in May 1865 to provide money to support her in exile. In December 1867, six days prior to her return from a trip away, part of the French House collased following a flood into the temple below.

Lady Duff Gordon's condition worsened in early 1869 forcing her to move, in search of better terminal care, to the spa resort of Helwan, just south of Cairo where she died on 13 July 1869, aged 48. She was buried in the English cemetery there. Her husband died in London on 27 October 1872 aged 61.

She and Duff Gordon had four children. Their daughter Janet Ann Ross was born in 1842 and died in 1927. Their second child was born in 1849 but died after only a few months of life. Their third child Maurice (1849–1896) became Sir Maurice Duff Gordon, 4th Baronet. Their fourth child Urania Duff Gordon was born in 1858 and died on 22 September 1877. Sir Maurice's daughter Caroline "Lina" (1874–1964) became an author and foreign correspondent for The Observer; she was the mother of author Gordon Waterfield and grandmother of the historian Sir Antony Beevor.

Lucie Austin commenced her literary life with translations, her earliest work being Barthold Niebuhr's Studies of Ancient Grecian Mythology, which was published in 1839 under her mother's name. 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. In 1847 she and her husband Sir Alexander Duff Gordon, translated Memoirs of the House of Brandenberg, by L. von Ranke. 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. In 1854 she translated The Russians in Bulgaria and Roumelia, 1828–29, by Baron von Moltke. She edited The History and Literature of the Crusades, by H. C. L. von Sybel, in 1861.

The first volume of Lady Duff Gordon's Letters from Egypt was published by Macmillan and Co. in May 1865, with a preface by her mother, Sarah Austin. This book is the best known and considered the most interesting of her productions. 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 Lady Duff Gordon by her daughter Janet Ross was published by Macmillan and Co. A second edition appeared in 1876. In 1902 a revised edition was published by R. Brimley Johnson with a memoir of Lady Duff Gordon by her daughter Janet Ross and a new introduction by George Meredith. This had the letters as they were written, omitting only the purely family matter which her daughter deemed as of no interest to the public.

Lady Duff Gordon is one of the characters in the novel The Mistress of Nothing by Kate Pullinger. Lady Duff Gordon's daughter (Janet Ross) recalled, "Tennyson told my mother that he had her in mind when he wrote 'The Princess'. I don't think she was as much flattered as many of his admirers would have been."