|
|
Article: BOOK REVIEW
- Article from:
- The Independent (London, England)
- Article date:
- April 24, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1994 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
|
IN 1988, Katherine Frank went to Cairo to search for the grave
of Lucie Duff Gordon, an upper-class Englishwoman whose Letters
from Egypt made her famous in the 1860s. The idea was to start with
the grave and work backwards through the life, which had been well
documented, and carefully conserved in family archives. But while
preparing to write this life, Frank's own took a terrible turn: her
husband, who had accompanied her to Cairo, died suddenly from
hepatitis on the fourth day, and the author was left alone at a
different graveside in Cairo's vast City of the Dead. This
catastrophe and its consequences - rapidly outlined in the prologue
to the biography - inform the whole work with a ...