Heritage Key has an interesting blog entry about the fascinating Victorian novelist, travel writer, and Egyptologist, Amelia B. Edwards.

Nice to see I'm not the only one who's fallen under Amelia's spell. I liked her book, A Thousand Miles up the Nile so much that I republished it! This book chronicles her trip up the Nile on a sailboat (a dahabeeya) in the 1870s, with beautifully written and fascinating accounts of the people and antiquities she found there. It makes wonderful reading even today, which is not surprising, because Edwards was a highly successful travel writer and novelist, and became so fascinated by Egyptology that she founded the Egypt Exploration Fund.

To make things even better, Amelia's quirky personality and turn of phrase were clearly used by Elizabeth Peters as a model for Amelia P. Emerson in her series of Victorian murder mysteries, where the main characters are Egyptologists!

So check out the article above and A Thousand Miles up the Nile. You won't be disappointed.