Recollections of Egyptian Princesses

Recollections of Egyptian Princesses
British and American Women in Egypt, 1820 – 1920.

1. Marget Benson (1865 - 1916) and Janet Agnes "Nettie" Gourlay (1863 - 1912)

The MA thesis that I am always threatening to do is a study of (western) women travellers in and writers about during the 19th – early 20th centuries. Hopefully (if certain courses actually run this year) I will be seriously busy with it from next month onwards.

Now, I don’t take quite the same approach to my Master’s thesis as Finn (played by Winona Ryder) does in How to make an American quilt. For a start, I just can’t seem to find the hunky fellas to distract me! Nope, this is just toil and sweat over piles of dusty, and sometimes quite ancient books. (In fact how come Finn actually manages to produce the amount of material she does, with her intensive love-life?)

But just as American quilt is a series of stories about women (who I have come to think of as "my Ladies"), so is my thesis. And the stories are every bit – if not actually more so – as interesting as the stories in the film, with the advantage that they are real-life. I really have met some remarkable characters, who so very often "found" themselves in Egypt, outside the constraints that their own societies placed on them.

Far too interesting, I think, to keep just to myself and to some long-suffering tutor!
So in this occasional blog, which I guess will probably follow my own research, I’d like to introduce a few of my Ladies to you.

The thesis, natch, will end up with a suitably boring academic title. That is the fate of all theses, and serve ‘em jolly well right. But for this blog, I would like to name it in honour of my own personal favourite Lady, Miss Ellen Chennells, governess to Princess Zeynab, who called her book "Recollections of an Egyptian Princess".

So here goes. The Ladies will come in no particular order. But as it happens, we will start with a tale of madness, lesbianism, the rich and famous, near war between Britain and France, attempted murder – and pioneering Egyptology. Beat that. (Still think that history is boring?)

Janet and Agnes are shown in the picture above; Nettie is on the left of the image, wearing white, and Maggie on the right, in black.

This year, a remarkable mid-summer excavation was undertaken at the Precinct of Mut, at the Temple of Karnak, by an expedition from John Hopkins University, who, together with Brooklyn Museum, have had the concession for many years. (You can read their online excavation blogs on the website "Hopkins in Egypt today", or find it through the interesting digs section of "Egyptology Today").

Johns Hopkins sent a mostly female team of archaeologists. And that is particularly appropriate, as one of the earliest excavations of the site was done by a two-woman team, pioneering the way for the large numbers of women now studying, and practicing, Egyptology. (In fact more women students than men, I hear…)

For ages Margaret Benson’s remarkable archaeological work was largely forgotten. A book about the Benson family published in 1971, for example, only gives a single sentence to it. If she was remembered at all, it was simply as a member of the Benson family.

The Bensons were, in fact, pretty famous; pa was Archbishop of Canterbury, they were close friends of the Gladstones (William Gladstone was a notable 19th century British Prime Minister), and the Wordsworths, the family of the poet. And one brother wrote the well-known Mapp and Lucia books, which are still in print.

But times change, fortunately, and now Margaret and Janet are now increasingly recognised for their achievement in being the first women to run an archaeological excavation. What’s more, the quality of their archaeological work has been re-assessed; the present excavators of the Temple of Mut, the Brooklyn Museum and Johns Hopkins University, make it clear in their dig website that: "their work was not bad for their day." Short recent biographies of both women have appeared, including Wikipedia entries, which give them credit for their work. As they jolly well should.

This strange story begins with a rather strange man, Edward White Benson, who decided that he was going to bring up a young girl especially to be his wife. Benson was later Archbishop of Canterbury, so you can imagine the headlines if this happened now…

Anyway, the unfortunate female who he selected was in fact a poorer cousin, Mary "Minnie" Sidgwick, who Benson chose when she was only eleven, and married when she was eighteen. At the very least it was totally selfish of Benson, effectively depriving Mary of any kind of normal childhood or adolescence, but he was, to say the least, a disturbed, violent character, with little sense of moral proportion in anything.

Whether Benson quite got the woman of his dreams is open to question, anyway; Mary wrote that she only felt that she really accepted him as a husband when he was dead, stretched out for his funeral in Canterbury Cathedral. In any case, she was a lifelong and enthusiastic supporter of the pink team, and so were her two daughters.

They had six children, of which Margaret was the fourth eldest. Margaret was at least given a reasonable education for a woman at the time, attending Truo High School and later Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she did very well, getting a first in something called the Womens’ Honour School of Philosophy.

In those days women were not allowed to take Oxbridge degrees; if this series gets as far as Winifred Blackman, we’ll meet another academically brilliant woman who suffered from this. However, Oxbridge was to become increasingly isolated in this respect; by the end of the 19th century women were taking degree level Egyptology courses at University College London, as we shall see.

Margaret was also considered to be good at art. She was actually tutored in art at Oxford by no less than the artist and critic Ruskin, who was supposed to have told her that he could teach her nothing further. A bit of a double-edged remark, when you think of it, especially coming from Rusin, but still, let’s be charitable. Anyway, you can decide for yourself from this drawing of one of the family pets, her favourite subject-matter.

She might have gone on to do very well at Oxford. But another strange Victorian convention was that the eldest daughter had to live with the family. So when Maggie’s older sister, Mary Eleanor ("Nellie"), died in 1890, aged 27, of diptheria, Maggie was forced to come down from university. Unlike Nellie she was shy, and did not take well to the social duties of an Archbishop’s daughter. The Benson family, given the tyrannical nature of the father, was also a far from easy place to be amongst.

Hypochondria was a fashionable Victorian way out, and one rather unsympathetic biography suggests that it was Maggie’s, too. However, her – mental and physical - ill-health actually seems to have been all too genuine; in fact it became increasingly serious.

Besides, she could sometimes escape; In 1893, she joined her brother Edward Frederick in his archaeological excavations at Athens. Early in 1894 she visited Egypt. She journeyed along the Nile as far south as Aswan, and began to learn hieroglyphs. She says in her book, The Temple of Mut in Asher, that it was during this journey that she first saw the Temple of Mut, part of the Karnak temple complex. She returned to Egypt later in the same year, having decided to excavate the Temple of Mut, and early in 1895 started work there.

More of this later. It’s a story in itself, so I’ll get the bio. out of the way first.

Generally, archaeological work in Egypt takes place only during autumn and winter; interestingly one of the rare exceptions has been this year’s summer dig by John Hopkins in the Precinct of Mut. So Maggie returned home, coming back to Karnak for the 1895 – 1896 digging-season. And it was during 1896 that the great love of her life, Nettie Gourlay, began to assist her.
Unfortunately we don’t know much about Nettie. She has been described rather unsympathetically as "rather a plain, abnormally silent young woman of thirty-three". Whether or not, she was to remain on intimate terms with Maggie for a long time.

Nettie was born in Dundee, Scotland, and her family obviously had enough money to allow her to study at University College London (UCL), under the great Professor (later Sir) William Flinders Petrie, the father of modern Egyptology.

Flinders Petrie was ahead of his time in many respects, not least his acceptance of women students not only on his Egyptology course at UCL – he had been offered the Chair of Egyptian Archaeology and Philology in 1892 – but as archaeologists on his excavations.

In 1896, in fact, Flinders Petrie team, working nearby at the Ramesseum, included two women, Miss Pirie and Miss Paget. Whether Nettie was also one of the team, or simply visiting Egypt at the time we don’t know; but it seems very likely that Flinders Petrie at least recommended her to Maggie as an assistant. Certainly Flinders Petrie was to give the Benson and Gourlay expedition a great deal of help.

Indeed, Nettie seems to have had ambitions to become a career Egyptologist, staying in the country after the end of the excavations at the Mut Temple in 1897 to help the Egyptologist Percy Newberry, who had also become attached to the expedition, to publish some of the finds made there. After that, however, she unfortunately seems to drop from sight; in 1900 she visited Egypt again, with Margaret, as mere tourists, and in 1906 they toured the West Country of England together.

Archbishop Benson died suddenly in 1896. Free at last, Maggie’s mother and brothers went with her to Luxor later that year for what turned out to be the last season of the expedition.

Unfortunately several of the family were to fall seriously ill in Egypt. Maggie’s brother Fred, and her mother’s live-in lover, Lucy Tait, caught typhoid fever. And Maggie, in turn, caught pleurisy, in fact very nearly dying of it; her life was only saved by emergency surgery in her hotel at Luxor, by a doctor who fortunately also happened to be staying there. A short time later she suffered a heart-attack, and this ended her work on the Temple of Mut.

To make things worse, this was far from all. From this time on she started to suffer increasingly from various forms of mental illness, including depression. By 1906 she was suffering hallucinations. She seems to have been jealous of her mother’s relationship with Lucy, particularly the (seemingly rather open) sexual element of this.

Finally she snapped. In around 1906 – 1907 (different biogs give different years, though I’d guess 1907, as she was happily with Nettie the year before) she finally went for her mother with the carving-knife at dinner. It was scary; it seems that she really meant to kill Mary; she was only prevented with some difficulty.

From then onwards, inevitably, she spend the rest of her life in the kind of homes for the mentally ill that the rich could afford, or at least under heavy medical care. She finally died in her sleep in 1916.

I’m left with a sense of waste; Maggie could have done a great deal. She was highly intelligent and multi-talented, and was learning Egyptology fast; who knows what she might have achieved.
She wrote seven books during her life, including the one which has made her famous, The Temple of Mut in Asher. Subjects range from stories about her pets to some pretty deep theological stuff, a book on economics called Capital, labour and trade, and the outlook, and what she herself considered her magnum opus, an attempt to reconcile science with Christianity, calledThe venture of rational faith, eventually published in 1908. After her father’s death she also edited three books written by him.

Next, the amazing story of the excavation of the "Temple of Mut in Asher". But to prevent this from becoming too long, I’ll post that separately.