Fictionalised History and Fabricated Artefacts:

The Amelia Peabody Mystery Series

Abstract

The Amelia Peabody mystery novels, written by Barbara Mertz under the name Elizabeth Peters, follow the adventures of an Englishwoman in Egypt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They combine elements of the modern romance novel, Victorian sensation fiction, and the colonial romances of H. Rider Haggard. The series uniquely merges fact and fiction, blurring the lines between scholarship and fantasy, particularly in Amelia Peabody’s Egypt: A Compendium (2003). Although the character Amelia Peabody bucks many of the cultural and gender norms of her time, she is not merely the product of a modern perspective of the past: her forebears include female explorers such as Amelia B. Edwards, Mary Kingsley, and Isabella Bird. Through the oppression Peabody faces as a Victorian woman in Egyptology, Mertz draws a parallel to the sexism she experienced herself as an Egyptologist in academia in the mid-twentieth century.