Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon ( Austin; 24 June 1821 – 14 July 1869) was an English author and translator who wrote as Lucie Gordon. She is best known for her Letters from Egypt, 1863–1865 (1865) and Last Letters from Egypt (1875), most of which are addressed to her husband, Alexander Duff-Gordon, and her mother, Sarah Austin. Having moved in prominent literary circles in London, she contracted tuberculosis and travelled in 1861 to South Africa for health reasons. She travelled on to Egypt in 1862 where she settled in Luxor, learnt Arabic, and wrote many letters about Egyptian culture, religion, and customs. Her letters are notable for humour, outrage at the ruling Ottomans, and many personal stories from the people around her. Early life Lucie was born on 24 June 1821, in Queen Square, Westminster, to John Austin (1790–1859), a jurist, and his wife, Sarah Austin, a translator. Lucie's father was a professor of jurisprudence and a noted intellectual while her mother who was well educated for a woman of the time was used to discussing politics on an equal footing with men. Her parents only child, her chief playfellows were her first cousin Henry Reeve, and the teen-age John Stuart Mill. Inheriting her parents' talents Lucie developed a strong love of reading and as she grew in vigour and in sense, she developed a strong tinge of originality and independence, with a marked love of animals. Her childhood also included having the elderly Jeremy Bentham (who had founded Utilitarianism) take her around his garden in an activity they called "ante-prandial circumgyration". In 1826 she went with her parents to Bonn on the Rhine, and stayed sufficiently long enough to return speaking fluent German. 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. By the age of 13 she was reading the "Odyssey" in the original. 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. Following the breakdown of her father's health, which was always delicate the family moved to Boulogue-sur-Mer where they lived from 1834 to 1836. In 1836, her father was appointed as a Royal Commissioner to inquire into the grievances in Malta. While his wife