Lucie Duff Gordon

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LDG , mid-Victorian translator, letter-writer, and travel-writer, published ten translations undertaken to help support her family. Her three volumes of travel letters were not originally intended for publication, and perhaps owe their honest style and natural tone to this very fact. Her work is occasionally discussed in essays on Victorian women travel writers. Its comparative neglect may be, as one source suggests, due to her complexities rather than to her failings.
Bloom, Abigail Burnham, editor. Nineteenth-Century British Women Writers. Greenwood Press, 2000.
195
  • BirthName: Lucie Austin
    As a child LDG chose to spell her name with a y, and her mother and her husband also preferred this spelling. Her marriage certificate lists her as Lucy, but apart from one document in 1867, she generally signed her name with the original ie spelling after 1840.
    Frank, Katherine. Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt. Hamish Hamilton, 1994.
    61

  • Nickname: Toodie
    This, no doubt a childish version of Lucie, was the way she signed her letters to her husband which were later published, though not intended for publication.

  • Married: Lady Duff Gordon
  • Titled:
  • Indexed: Duff-Gordon; Lucie Duff Gordon
    Duff Gordon, Lucie. “Preface and Introduction”. Letters from Egypt (1862-1869), edited by Gordon Waterfield, Enlarged Centenary edition, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969, p. xiii - 39.
    1, 8
    British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Black and white, head-and-shoulders sketch of Lucie Duff Gordon in profile by George Frederic Watts, c. 1848, used as frontispiece to Duff Gordon's "Letters From Egypt", 1865. She sits in an armchair, facing to the left, wearing a loose gown with a high neckline, and her smooth hair is pulled back into a low bun. Below is her signature, "Lucie Duff Gordon".

Milestones

24 June 1821

Lucie Austin (later LDG ), only child of Sarah and John Austin , was born at the then 1 Queen Square in London.
This part of the square was later replaced by what is now Queen Anne's Gate.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Frank, Katherine. Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt. Hamish Hamilton, 1994.
13-14

1843

LDG 's first publication appeared: an anonymous translation of Barthold Niebuhr 's Stories of the Gods and Heroes of Greece.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Frank, Katherine. Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt. Hamish Hamilton, 1994.
122

By 10 June 1865

Lucie Duff Gordon published her best-known work, Letters from Egypt, 1863-65.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
1963 (1865): 773

14 July 1869

LDG died at Boulak in Egypt, of tuberculosis.
Searight, Sarah, and Lucie Duff Gordon. “New Introduction”. Letters from Egypt, Virago, 1983, p. vii - xvii.
xii
Frank, Katherine. Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt. Hamish Hamilton, 1994.
340-50

Biography

Birth and Family

24 June 1821

Lucie Austin (later LDG ), only child of Sarah and John Austin , was born at the then 1 Queen Square in London.
This part of the square was later replaced by what is now Queen Anne's Gate.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Frank, Katherine. Lucie Duff Gordon: A Passage to Egypt. Hamish Hamilton, 1994.
13-14

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