British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women by Molly Youngkin (review)

Molly Youngkin's British Women Writers and the Reception of Ancient Egypt, 1840–1910: Imperialist Representations of Egyptian Women is an interesting study of the ways that female Victorian writers appropriated images of ancient Egyptian women to assert agendas for their own emancipation. Using canonical texts (such as George Eliot's Daniel Deronda [1876] and Florence Nightingale's treatises) as well as lesser known cultural productions (such as Michael Field's verse), Youngkin analyzes British women's literature and the ways that writers projected their own desires for political and social emancipation upon romanticized images of ancient Egyptian women. Youngkin argues that British women writers found historical and mythological ancient Egyptian figures to be strong role models to be emulated, while modern Egyptian women were denigrated by the imperial tenor of the era. Still, they claimed ancient Greek and Renaissance Italian women's images even more as their own, revealing their larger discomfort with the so-called Eastern qualities of Egyptians in the era of Orientalist imperialism.

Throughout her book, Youngkin asserts that British women writers were less enthralled with the exotic and strange elements of Egyptian histories and cultures than their male contemporaries, and more inclined to promote values of strength, loyalty, and courage that they read into figures such as the ancient goddess Isis and the Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra. Youngkin makes it clear that these women received their information about Egyptian women from a variety of sources, as diverse as Herodotus, William Shakespeare, Edward Lane and other Orientalists, and sensationalist reportage about the new Egyptology movement. None of these sources can be held up as historically accurate when it comes to understanding the contemporary Egyptian culture of their day. Indeed, Youngkin recognizes that the British women on whom she focuses are uninterested in finding role models in their Egyptian contemporaries, because modern Egypt "had been thoroughly denigrated by British Culture, which saw the influence of Arab/Muslim culture in Egypt as threatening" (16).

That being said, the heart of Youngkin's book is deep analysis of literary works, by the likes of Nightingale, Eliot, and Michael Field (the pen name of poets Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley). While these women were quite distinct from one another in their life experiences, worldviews, and positions within British society, they shared the overarching Orientalism of British imperialism, which informed their work in myriad ways. Nightingale read the East, for example, through the lens of Orientalist Protestant narratives of a so-called decayed and corrupt Islamic world juxtaposed by her fantastical reading of Biblical virtue and the redemptive nature of Renaissance religious art. Eliot framed her work within the context of the so-called superiority of Western civilization and tried to insert ancient Egypt into an imagined narrative about the development of Western civilization in order to make a connection between ancient Egyptian and modern British cultures. Cooper and Bradley were largely disdainful of the archetypical ancient Egyptian woman—whom they read as Shakespeare's Cleopatra—so they wrote her as a foil for their own glorification of Greek ideals. Youngkin demonstrates that all of these writers tried to insert elements of ancient Egypt—increasingly omnipresent in the era of Egyptomania, for example—into their understandings of their own places in Britain and the world, and within the framework of debates about women's social roles.

Youngkin's book is a fascinating read for anyone who is interested in the Orientalism debate. Her argument, however, begs for a deeper analysis into the issue of modern British women using ancient Mediterranean women as role models and foils, at the very historical moment that Orientalist narratives are conflating the ancient and the modern in the East. This is particularly troubling in Egypt; as the Suez Canal debacle and the country's formal absorption into the British Empire in the 1880s demonstrates, this was...