Lady Duff Gordon's Letters from Egypt


Revised Edition with Memoir by Her Daughter Janet Ross

New Introduction by George Meredith

_SECOND IMPRESSION_

LONDON: R. BRIMLEY JOHNSON
1902

[Photograph of Lady Duff Gordon from sketch by G. F. Watts, R.A., about
1848: ill1.jpg]




INTRODUCTION


The letters of Lady Duff Gordon are an introduction to her in person. She
wrote as she talked, and that is not always the note of private
correspondence, the pen being such an official instrument. Readers
growing familiar with her voice will soon have assurance that, addressing
the public, she would not have blotted a passage or affected a tone for
the applause of all Europe. Yet she could own to a liking for flattery,
and say of the consequent vanity, that an insensibility to it is inhuman.
Her humour was a mouthpiece of nature. She inherited from her father the
judicial mind, and her fine conscience brought it to bear on herself as