The symptoms of ‘Egyptomania’ subsided with the Great Depression and the tailing off of art deco style. A world war had stalled Egyptological excavations, and in the 1930s another global conflict approached. As I suggested in the introduction, it was the deaths of the giants of Egyptology, not new discoveries and breakthroughs, that dominated Egyptological reports in the newspapers across this decade. Flinders Petrie, who survived the 1930s, was to die on fi lm in 1940, demonstrating the extent to which Egyptology was enmeshed in sensationalist fictions, even beyond the zenith of collaborative activity which has been the focus of this book. A museum archaeologist with Petrie's name is the first victim of the reanimated mummy in the 1940 fi lm The Mummy's Hand; Petrie actually died in 1942 at the age of eighty-nine, less than two years after the death of his namesake was depicted on screen. This is a fittingly symbolic representation: the Egyptology and the creative cultures that it had encouraged, participated in and, at times, derided, spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was gone.

The final chapters of the lives of these scholars were foregrounded and accompanied by those of many of the writers, artists and thinkers on whom this study has focused: Marie Corelli and E. Nesbit died in 1924, H. Rider Haggard in 1925, Mabel Collins in 1927.