The overlooked intellectual passions of women who wrote about Egyptian history, excavated ancient sites, and founded institutions are returned to their proper place in the history of 19th- and early 20th-century Western Egyptology in Women in the Valley of Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age by historian Kathleen Sheppard (Tea on the Terrace).
Beginning with Amelia Edwards, called the Godmother of Egyptology, Sheppard mines journals, letters, and published travelogues to paint intimate portraits of women who were often as interested in preserving Egyptian monuments as in the collection of antiquities. These women were part of colonizing institutions, as Sheppard acknowledges sensitively from the start, while also recognizing that these Western women, along with Egyptians, often did the field work upon which the male heroes of Western Egyptology built their reputations. Others carried out the preservation of the antiquities that were removed from Egypt, like Caroline Ransom Williams, who installed the tomb of Perneb at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Several of these women, such as Maggie Benson as well as Edwards herself, traveled with women who were their partners in romance as well as adventure. Sheppard portrays these same-sex relationships not only as central to her subjects' personal lives but as essential support for their work in a period when unmarried women couldn't travel abroad alone.
All readers with an interest in women's history, the history of Egyptology, or LGBTQ+ history will enjoy the opportunity to become acquainted with these women's stories. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library