A Thousand Miles Up the Nile

by Amelia Edwards, Brian Hunt (Editor), Brian Hunt (Introduction)

Overview

Victorian traveler Amelia Edwards was already a successful writer when she traveled a thousand miles up the Nile with an Egyptian crew and a few friends. She came, she tells us, merely to get out of the weather in Europe. The trip changed her life.

A best seller of Victorian travel when published in 1877, "A Thousand Miles Up the Nile" has enthralled readers for more than a century and a quarter. With the original illustrations and footnotes, this is an enhanced version with a new introduction and additional, modern footnotes.

Edwards' prodigious knowledge and research of ancient Egypt, Egyptian gods, pharaohs, and classical history places her travels in context for you. But it is her sensitive, romantic descriptions of Egyptian people and places that makes the book a delight to read over and over.

In her writing style, we see the earlier influences in her life brought to bear on prose that is a delight to read and a book that is exhaustive in its treatment of its subject. Her understanding of music, poetry, and art all combine in A Thousand Miles. The book is a symphony of love for time and place. It begins quietly, swells to heights, then is relieved by minute details and humor. She educates the reader and then loses herself in rapturous descriptions of life on the Nile.

On her return, she spent two years writing this book and was the driving force in the founding of the Egypt Exploration Fund. This superb account of Egypt in the 19th century will remain a classic for years to come.

This long out-of-print volume is available as an affordable, well-formatted book for e-readers and smartphones. With the original illustrations and footnotes, this is an enhanced version with a new introduction and additional, modern footnotes.

Be sure to LOOK INSIDE by clicking the cover above or download a sample.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940016395135
Publisher:	BIG BYTE BOOKS
Publication date:	02/07/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Born in 1831 and mostly educated by her energetic and doting mother, Edwards from an early age was possessed of passion and ambition. Through her adolescence and early adulthood, however, she struggled to discover a proper outlet for that energy. She spent seven years intensely training as a singer and musician, only to later feel those years were wasted, as she did not make a career of it. She studied art and later spent hours and hours sketching on her trip up the Nile, using some of those sketches to illustrate this book.

Edwards never married, though nearly did once. She lived for three decades with an older female friend, Mrs. Braysher. Edwards' companion in Italy and Egypt was Lucy Renshawe, the woman referred to as L-- in the Egyptian tale you're about to read. Edwards never gives a hint of the nature of her relationships and her biographer, Joan Rees, finds nothing in letters or the writing by friends to illuminate those relationships. We know only that she was very close to her mother and that close female relationships seemed important to her throughout her life.

She tried her hand more successfully at journalism in her twenties and then secured her independence as a popular writer of novels. By the time she went to Egypt in 1873, she had published several successful novels and a well-received travel book on a trip through the Dolomites.

On her return from Egypt, she spent two years writing "A Thousand Miles Up the Nile" and became the driving force behind the founding of the Egypt Exploration Fund.