Writing the Sphinx

Eleanor Dobson is Associate Professor in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. She is the author of Victorian Alchemy: Science, Magic and Ancient Egypt (2022) and Writing the Sphinx: Literature, Culture and Egyptology (2020), the second chapter of which focuses on Corelli. Eleanor worked with Joanna Turner co-editing and co-writing for a special issue of Victoriographies on Corelli in 2025.

This magnificent book investigates the startlingly complex ways in which literature, art and Egyptology have influenced each other. With an impressive range of textual and material forms, Dobson provides a vivid, authoritative and revelatory analysis of cultural engagements with the idea of ancient Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Once read, Egyptology will never seem the same again.

• Introduction 1. ‘Wonderful Things’: Howard Carter, Literary Genre & Material Intertextuality2. ‘Fairy Tales’ and ‘Bunkum’: Marie Corelli, Artefacts & Fabrications3. ‘The Master-Key that Opens Every Door’: Hieroglyphs, Translations & Palimpsests4. ‘Drunk on the Dead’: Intoxication, Perfume & Mummy Dust5. ‘The Sphinx Will Speak at Last’: Visions, Communications & Spiritual Experience Coda Appendix 1: ‘Story of an Egyptian Necklace’Index