THE PHANTOM COACH: Collected Ghost Stories Read Free

Women’s Suffrage), made her a role model for all independent-minded females. In a recent dramatised television documentary about her career, she was played to perfection by Margaret Tyzack.
    Amazingly, she found time to write a long final novel, Lord Brackenbury ,published in three volumes in 1880, following serialisation in The Graphic with illustrations by Luke Fildes. This stirring narrative (concerning Lord B’s son and heir who detests politics and public life and contrives to disappear in Italy—subsequently enjoying life as a sailor—thus enabling his younger brother to inherit the title) was Amelia’s most popular novel, running through fifteen editions and translated into Italian, German, French, and Russian. Around the same time, she penned her last ghost story, ‘Was it an Illusion?’, for Arrowsmith’s Thirteen to Dinner Christmas Annual in 1881.
    During the next decade, Amelia devoted herself entirely to the Egypt Exploration Fund, now working as the sole honorary secretary, and (as stated in a tribute by the Illustrated London News ) ‘made from a small beginning a national undertaking. The labour was enormous . . . she never spared herself, and never failed to give all information asked of her.’ Every year she edited a new volume ‘by Petrie, Ernest Gardiner and other scholars of distinction, describing the discovery or examination of the most interesting biblical and classical sites in Egypt. Thus it was really due to Miss Edwards that a mass of information was added yearly to the stores of learning. All this was unpaid labour . . . Her best memorial is in the hearts of her many friends, to whom she was endeared by acts of affection and by the unwonted charm of the greatest earnestness contrasted with the most lively wit.’
    During the winter of 1889–90, Amelia made a triumphant lecture tour of the United States, ending in Boston, where she was presented with a bracelet inscribed ‘from grateful and loving friends—the women of Boston’. Her natural flair for acting and drama made her an ideal lecturer, and she was fêted wherever she went. The tour was not, however, entirely without mishap: in Columbus, Ohio she slipped and broke her left arm, an injury from which she never fully recovered.
    Her last book was Pharaohs, Fellahs and Explorers (1891), a collection of her American lectures. These ranged from ‘The Explorer in Egypt’ and ‘Hieroglyphic Writing’ to ‘The Buried Cities of Ancient Egypt’ and ‘Queen Hatusu, and her Expedition to the Land of Punt’. Although by now in failing health, Amelia set off on a new lecture tour, this time around England. Sadly, it was to be her last: following a bout of influenza, and thoroughly exhausted by two years of almost continuous lecturing, she died at Weston-super-Mare on 15 April 1892. Not long before, she had been awarded a well-deserved Civil List Pension ‘in consideration of her services to literature and archaeology’.
    She bequeathed her library and priceless collection of Egyptian antiquities to University College, London, together with the sum of £2,415 to found a Chair of Egyptology. The first occupant was her protégé, Flinders Petrie. The unique Edwards library and museum was a valuable bequest to the nation, and was much augmented and enlarged over the following years, fuelling the ever-growing British obsession with ancient Egypt, which culminated in the Carnarvon/Carter expedition of 1922 and the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb.
    Amelia Edwards was an extraordinary woman, who made significant contributions to three very different fields: English literature, archaeology, and the cause of women’s suffrage. Readers can still appreciate her work in the first two fields through her many remarkable books. As Jane Robinson wrote in her 1990 study, Wayward Women , she was not just an outstanding scholar and traveller, but also ‘a marvellous writer, which is why A Thousand Miles Up The Nile has remained one of the most