Oxford DNB Article: Edwards, Amelia Ann Blanford

Oxford DNB article: Edwards, Amelia Ann Blanford

Edwards, Amelia Ann Blanford (1831–1892), author and Egyptologist, was born in Colebrook Row, Islington, London, on 30 June 1831, the only child of Thomas Edwards (1786–1860), a half-pay army officer who later worked for the Provincial Bank of Ireland in London, and Alicia Walpole (d. 1860), eldest daughter of Robert Walpole, an Irish barrister connected with the Norfolk Walpoles. She was a lonely, quiet child who was educated at home until she was eight, by her mother and then by private tutors. She read voraciously, wrote stories, poems, and romances from an early age, and illustrated ‘everything she read’ (Amelia B. Edwards MS 437), becoming a skilful artist. By the age of fourteen her stories were being published in periodicals, but she had decided to devote her life to music. For seven years she worked ‘with unremitting industry’ (ibid.) at singing and composing vocal and instrumental scores. In 1849 she took up the guitar and the organ, and was in 1850 appointed organist at St Michael's, Wood Green, Middlesex. This was an unhappy period in her life. She was ill with typhus for many months in 1849 and then dogged by sore throats which affected her singing. In 1851 she agreed to an unsuitable engagement to a man whom she had known for several years. This alliance blighted her chances of a wished-for romance with an Irish cousin (ibid., 393). She dreaded the walk home from church with her fiancé, and resigned her appointment as organist and broke off her engagement in 1852.

Amelia Edwards taught music and worked at translating Italian poetry in the evenings. Then, in 1853, one of her short stories was published in Eliza Cooke's Journal and paid for. While she was in Paris with a cousin she ‘resolved to be a writer’ and in later life deeply regretted the years wasted on music (Amelia B. Edwards MSS). In 1854 she visited the Rhine, Paris, and Belgium, and the following year, after a time in Burgundy, returned to England to find her name ‘famous’ (ibid.). Her first novel, My Brother's Wife (1864), had been very well received and she was welcomed as a promising new author (ibid.). Between 1855 and 1880 she published nine novels, a collection of stories, Monsieur Maurice (1873), A Summary of English History (1858), a translation from the French, A Lady's Captivity among Chinese Pirates (1859), and The History of France (1858). She provided biographies for Colnaghi's Photographic Historical Portrait Gallery (1860) and wrote three children's books: The Young Marquis (1857); Sights and Stories (1862), about a holiday in the north of Belgium; and The Story of Cervantes (1863). She also prepared a volume of ballads (1865) and two anthologies of poetry (1879). Her most successful novels were Barbara's History (1864), which was translated into French, German, and Italian, and Lord Brackenbury (1880), which went through twenty editions. Barbara's History was likened to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, but without the ‘coarseness’: the artistically gifted heroine loves a man with a dark secret, yet learns to develop and realize her own potential.

Amelia Edwards contributed regularly to Household Words and All the Year Round (usually providing a story for Charles Dickens's Christmas numbers) and worked as http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/8529[14/10/2013 15:38:31] Oxford DNB article: Edwards, Amelia Ann Blanford

music, drama, and art critic and as leader writer to daily and weekly papers, including the Morning Post. Both her parents died in 1860, and in 1864 she moved to live with a much older widowed friend, Ellen Braysher, at Westbury-on-Trym, near Bristol (Rees, Amelia Edwards, 71).

Amelia Edwards was fluent in French and Italian and described herself as ‘an insatiable traveller’. After bouts of work she spent sketching holidays in Europe and, in 1872, undertook the adventure, with a friend, Lucy Renshawe, through the Dolomites that she described and illustrated in Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys (1873). The area was then largely unknown and inaccessible, and her enthusiasm and detailed descriptions helped open it to tourism.

In 1873 Amelia Edwards and Lucy Renshawe, dissatisfied with the weather in central France, set off for Egypt. It was a journey that changed the course of her life. She became so fascinated with Egypt that it dominated her thinking and her work for the next two decades. With other tourists whom they had met in Cairo the two women hired a dahabiyah and sailed to Wadi Halfa, accompanying friends met on the crossing from Italy. While at Abu Simbel the party discovered, excavated, and described in detail a previously unknown small temple with a painted chamber. Amelia Edwards and Lucy Renshawe also visited Syria, crossed the Lebanese ranges to Damascus and Baalbek, and travelled on to Constantinople (Amelia B. Edwards MS 546). On her return to England she read extensively about ancient Egypt and consulted such specialists as Dr Samuel Birch and R. S. Poole on matters of historical and archaeological detail. She was also ‘led step by step to the study of hieroglyphical writing’ (Edwards, A Thousand Miles, xiii). With this knowledge and her own experiences she wrote her very successful A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1876), illustrated from her watercolours. Praised by reviewers for its ‘brilliant descriptions of scenery and the exactness of its information’ (Bristol Mercury, 16 April 1892) and as ‘a delightful, gossiping book’ (The World, 6 Feb 1877), it is still recognized as ‘one of the great classics of the history of the Nile’ (Crewe). She regarded it as the most important of her books and the one for which she hoped to be remembered (Amelia B. Edwards MS 477). Her studies continued and by 1878 she was contributing articles on Egyptological matters to weekly journals. In the decade before her death she contributed some hundred well-researched articles on Egypt to The Academy alone—for which she refused payment (R. S. Poole, The Academy, 28 April 1892). She corresponded regularly with various European scholars, particularly Professor Gaston Maspero, then of the École des Hautes Études in Paris.

While in Egypt, Amelia Edwards had been troubled by the neglect of the ancient monuments and the vandalism of visitors who bought up everything the local people could steal for them. At that time Mariette Pasha, the French director of excavation since 1858, was forming the national museum at Bulaq, Cairo, and clearing the great temples—some thought with more enthusiasm than care. In 1879, when Egypt came under the dual control of France and Britain, she saw an opportunity of approaching Mariette with the suggestion that a body of subscribers in Britain might be sanctioned by the new khedive to sponsor scientific excavation, preferably in the Nile delta, (James, 11). The reply gave some encouragement, for in January 1880 she wrote for support to several Egyptologists and persuaded the Morning Post to encourage correspondence on Egyptian topics. A number of eminent men rallied to her call, including the wealthy Sir Erasmus Wilson (whose book, Egypt of the Past, she updated in 1887). In June 1880 a gathering of interested parties wrote to Mariette, but he was near death and in January 1881 Maspero succeeded him. Édouard Naville, the Swiss Egyptologist, approached Maspero, who signified that he http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/8529[14/10/2013 15:38:31] Oxford DNB article: Edwards, Amelia Ann Blanford

had no objection to excavations by a new English society. On 27 March 1882 the Egypt Exploration Fund (later Egypt Exploration Society) was brought into being. R. S. Poole and Amelia Edwards were elected honorary joint secretaries, and Edwards retained the post until her death in 1892. An appeal for scientific excavations produced sufficient funds to send Naville on the first excavations in January 1883. At the end of that season the khedive presented two important finds to the society which were donated to the British Museum in London. The success of this first season brought new funds and in 1884 the young archaeologist Flinders Petrie was sent to work under Maspero's direction.

Amelia Edwards worked tirelessly for the society, soliciting funds, lecturing throughout England, and writing about the progress of the fund's work. She raised sponsorship for the Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith to join Petrie. She and Poole communicated with each other constantly, but she was seldom able to attend the frequent meetings in London and felt excluded from decision making. She minded this deeply, as she had largely given up her own writing and was in some financial straits on behalf of this cause. In 1886 Poole resigned as joint secretary and Amelia Edwards took sole charge of editing and publishing the society's annual memoirs and reporting each season's finds to the press.

Amelia Edwards was a contributing member at several orientalist conferences and in 1885 read a paper in Vienna, ‘The dispersion of antiquities’. She prepared articles on Egyptological topics for the new Encyclopaedia Britannica and its American supplement. Her translation of Maspero's L'archéologie égyptienne (as Egyptian Archaeology, 1887) had copious footnotes based on her own specialist knowledge. In the preface she stated that:

to collect and exhibit objects of ancient art and industry is worse than idle if we do not also endeavour to disseminate some knowledge of the history of those arts and industries, and the processes employed by the artists and craftsmen of the past. (Edwards, ‘Preface’, vi)

She was active in other areas of both classical and biblical study, and as vice- president of the Society for the Promotion of Women's Suffrage.

The American branch of the Egypt Exploration Society soon flourished. In 1886 Smith College in Massachusetts awarded Amelia Edwards an honorary LLD, ‘the first distinction of the kind ever bestowed on a woman’ (The Academy, 24 July 1886). In 1887 Columbia College in New York also honoured her. In 1889–90 she was invited to lecture in the United States and in five months addressed some 100,000 people at about 110 meetings in 16 states, despite having broken her arm early in the tour. Her lectures were published as Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers (1892) a month before her death. She brought to her writing and lecturing on Egyptology the liveliness and vigour of the novelist, the knowledge of the scholar, and her own irrepressible sense of humour.

In October 1891, while supervising antiquities arriving from Egypt at London docks, Amelia Edwards contracted a lung infection which led to her death. She died on 15 April 1892 at 31 Royal Terrace, Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, and was buried on the 18th in the Braysher family tomb in the churchyard of St Mary, Henbury, near Bristol, her grave marked by an obelisk. Shortly before her death she was awarded a civil-list pension of £75 per year in recognition of her work. She bequeathed her Egyptological library and her own collection of antiquities (now the Edwards Library and Museum) to University College, London, where she had also founded the first

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/8529[14/10/2013 15:38:31] Oxford DNB article: Edwards, Amelia Ann Blanford

ever chair devoted to Egyptology. By her choice, its first occupant was Flinders Petrie. Her other books, the original watercolours from her travels, and her personal papers she left to Somerville College, Oxford. The marble bust sculpted by Percival Ball in Rome in 1873 she bequeathed to the National Portrait Gallery, London. She was a tall, dignified woman with dark eyes and, in later years, iron-grey hair, ‘with a pleasant voice and manner’ (Bradford Observer, April 1892). Her writing makes it clear that she had a delightful sense of the ridiculous and an enjoyment of life. Her contemporaries spoke of her charm and wit. She was naturally gifted, but worked hard at her talents, and she had the ability to make abstruse subjects come alive without losing any factual correctness.

The Egypt Exploration Society acknowledges its foundation (as the Egypt Exploration Fund) chiefly to the efforts of Amelia Edwards. It was the very first society to undertake ‘the excavation of Egypt's buried places and the recovery of its records by the employment of scientific archaeological methods’ (The Work of the Egypt Exploration Fund). In 1918 the society could pride itself that its excavations were always thoroughly investigated and recorded; the objects preserved and the site left so that subsequent explorers could resume work without difficulty; its results published fully and without delay; and its share of any finds presented to museums and institutions where its members resided. It continued to follow these standards into the late twentieth century.

Amelia Edwards is no longer remembered as a novelist and journalist, but her travel books and her contribution to Egyptology remain an enduring legacy.

DEBORAH MANLEY

Sources Somerville College, Oxford, Amelia B. Edwards MSS · obituaries of A. B. Edwards, AM Oxf., priv. coll., NRA 21/7/97 TS · T. G. H. James, ed., Excavating in Egypt: the Egyptian Exploration Society, 1882–1982 (1982) · A. B. Edwards, A thousand miles up the Nile (1891); repr. (Los Angeles, 1983) · M. Bentham-Edwards, Reminiscences (1898) · J. Rees, Amelia Edwards: traveller, novelist and Egyptologist (1998) · J. Rees, Writings on the Nile (1995) · The work of the Egypt Exploration Fund, 1882–1918 [n.d., c.1919] · A. B. Edwards, ‘Preface’, in G. Maspero, Egyptian archaeology, trans. A. B. Edwards (1887) · R. David, The Macclesfield collection of Egyptian antiquities (1980) · Q. Crewe, ‘Introduction’, in A. Edwards, Untrodden peaks and unfrequented valleys, new edn (1982) · R. M. Janssen, The first hundred years: Egyptology at University College London, 1892–1992 (1992) · d. cert. · J. W. Pye, ‘Painful last days of the queen of Egyptology’, KMT: a Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt, 5/4 (1995), 77–8 Archives Egypt Exploration Society, corresp., notes, memoranda, and papers · Somerville College, Oxford, corresp. and literary papers, photographs, sketches · U. Oxf., Griffith Institute, album of Geographical material; notebook with various notes and extracts, albums containing watercolours and sketches · UCL, letters | U. Oxf., Griffith Institute, letters to Aquila Dodgson Likenesses H. Watkins, photograph, 1856–9, NPG [see illus.] · oils, 1872 · P. Ball, marble bust, 1873, NPG · photograph, 1889, Saxony, New York · A. Weger, stipple (after photograph), NPG · F. R. Window, carte-de-visite, NPG · pastel drawing, Somerville College, Oxford · photographs, Somerville College, Oxford, A. M. Edwards archive Wealth at death £8446 15s. 5d.: resworn probate, March 1893, CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1892)

Deborah Manley, ‘Edwards, Amelia Ann Blanford (1831–1892)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8529, accessed 14 Oct 2013]

Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards (1831–1892): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/8529

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/8529[14/10/2013 15:38:31]