Lucie's father was a professor of jurisprudence and a noted intellectual while her mother was well educated for a woman of the time, used to discussing politics on an equal footing with men.

She had scant regular instruction, but was for a short time at a mixed school of boys and girls kept by George Edward Biber at Hampstead, where she learnt Latin.

She also kept her pet snake twined into her plaited hair, and was thought to be "un peu unmanageable" by her mother and "a potential homicide" by a friend of the family.

A noted character in the establishment in Queen Square was a Nubian boy called Hassan el Bakkeet, who had been enslaved before being rescued by English missionaries.

He was found crouching on Lady Duff-Gordon's doorstep one night, when she was returning from a theatrical party at Charles Dickens's home.

Following the birth of her son Maurice in 1849, Lady Duff-Gordon began to succumb to tuberculosis and by the winter of 1861 she had become so ill that her doctors advised her to travel to a warmer, drier climate.

While she was familiar with the country from reading Herodotus, the Bible, Arabian Nights and Alexander William Kinglake's Eothan, they hadn't prepared her for the realities of modern Egypt when she disembarked in Alexandria in October 1862.

Open to other cultures and a supporter of working-class politics in the United Kingdom, Lady Duff-Gordon's sympathies were with the hard-working fellahin (peasantry) of Egypt.

[12] During the first years of her residence on the Nile she wrote numerous letters to her family, in which she gave vivid descriptions of Eastern life and many details of domestic manners and customs.

These were collected and edited by her mother Sarah Austin and published as Letters from Egypt, 1863–1865 in May 1865 to provide money to support her in exile.

As a result of her literary fame, many British travellers passing through Luxor made a point of calling on her, including the writer Edward Lear in January 1867 and the Prince and Princess of Wales in February 1869.

"[14] Hiring a servant Omar, who was known by his nickname Abu Halawy ("father of sweets") Lady Duff-Gordon proceeded upstream.

She described it in a letter to her husband in 1864 as "The view all round my house is magnificent on every side, over the Nile in front facing north-west and over a splendid range of green and distant orange buff hills to the south-east, where I have a spacious covered terrace.

She also gained a reputation for having a "lucky eye" and thus being regarded as a bringer of good luck was called upon for numerous flavours including visiting houses under construction, inspecting cattle and young brides.

[19] Lady Duff-Gordon's condition worsened in early 1869 forcing her to move, in search of better terminal care, to the spa resort of Helwan, just south of Cairo where she died on 13 July 1869, aged 48.

Lucie Austin commenced her literary life with translations, her earliest work being Barthold Niebuhr's Studies of Ancient Grecian Mythology, which was published in 1839 under her mother's name.

[9] In 1844 she translated Wilhelm Meinhold's Mary Schweidler, the Amber Witch, a narrative dressed up as a 17th-century chronicle, and concocted to discredit rationalist methods of biblical criticism.

[1] She translated Stella and Vanessa, a romance by A. F. L. de Wailly, and in 1853 two other works: The Village Doctor, by the Countess d'Arbouville, and Ferdinand I and Maximilian II of Austria, by L. von Ranke.

[22] In 1902 a revised edition was published by R. Brimley Johnson with a memoir of Lady Duff-Gordon by her daughter Janet Ross and a new introduction by George Meredith.

Lady Duff-Gordon's daughter (Janet Ross) recalled, "Tennyson told my mother that he had her in mind when he wrote 'The Princess'.