A Victorian Traveler in the Middle East is about the life and work of Lady Annie Brassey (1839–87). Suffering from “weak lungs,” Annie Brassey's health made it imperative that she winter in a warmer climate. Fortunately, Lord Brassey, who served as civil lord and parliamentary secretary of the Admiralty, and had made a fortune in industry, had a passion for sailing. Together they traveled the world in Lord Brassey's private yacht, making it possible for Lady Brassey to collect material from the places she visited for a private museum, photograph and purchase photographs of these countries to fill seventy albums, and write four successful travel books. She also gave birth to five children, one of whom died.

Nancy Micklewright has three aims in this book: to introduce a hitherto neglected woman traveler-photographer and collector of photographs, examine representations of the Middle East in the Brassey albums and those of their contemporaries, and interrogate the Orientalist assertion that a hegemonic discourse about the Middle East existed.

Micklewright has organized this study into five chapters. The first discusses Annie Brassey in the context of nineteenth-century photography. The second analyzes her as a traveler, writer, and public figure. Chapter 3 examines the Middle Eastern Brassey albums, and chapter 4 albums by a wide range of people who visited the Middle East, to place the Brassy albums within a large context. The last, rather short, chapter concludes the book.

Unfortunately, Lady Brassey proved a reluctant subject. Although she wrote four books and left detailed accounts of her travel and collections, her papers include very little personal data. After sorting through diaries, letters, notes, and published work, Micklewright concludes that Brassey was stoic about her health, liked to “get on with it,” had little use for the suffrage issue, and lacked curiosity about the lives of the people she met and photographed. Lady Brassey's ordinariness confounds. One longs to place her with those Victorian travelers and adventuresses valorized as emancipated but cannot. Despite her wide experience, Lady Brassey did not grow and change with experience. As the author points out, her hobbies—botany, languages, photography, and reading about exotic places—were “suitable” for ladies; an interest in these subjects did not challenge conventional gender ideology. Even her travel, with the family and in the recreated home on the yacht, was accomplished within rigid gender roles and expectations.

Micklewright's examination of Brassey's albums and of other albums, of a clergyman, military gentlemen, and traveler-engineer, and one to commemorate the Prince of Wales's tour, is painstaking and detailed. She looked at the seven Brassey albums on the Middle East—mostly on Egypt, with one on Turkey—for details about the photographers whose work was represented, the subjects, and the layout. She located at least twenty-five professional photographers in Cairo who produced commercial work for tourists. Annie Brassey bought photos from these men, especially from two. Examining their work, Micklewright concluded they carried stock images as well as a wide range of photographs in anticipation of client tastes.

Micklewright makes it clear there was no single set of images of the Middle East. True enough, everyone photographed certain monuments, for example, the Sphinx and peasant women drawing water, but the way that they photographed these sites and people differed. Women were photographed more frequently and in more casual poses than we have been led to expect. The erotic harem woman, posed seductively behind windows and walls, did not feature in any of these albums. The author conveys the notion that the corpus of photographs is much larger than we have been led to believe, and, much more varied. Moreover, she argues convincingly that people in the nineteenth century may not have been captive to the Orientalist discourse that constructed Middle Eastern people as passive, their environment unchanging, and their women available for at least “imagined” conquest.

The main subjects of this study, Lady Brassey and her seven volumes of photographs depicting the Middle East in the 1870s and 1880s, directly challenge the main tenets of Orientalism. However, Nancy Michelwright goes beyond Orientalism to discuss women as travelers, writers, and photographers; commercial photography and the new travel industry; and photograph albums. This book is illustrated with plates, extensively footnoted, and includes a valuable bibliography, as well as appendices on Lady Brassey's travel books and the content of the entire seventy albums she assembled. It will appeal primarily to scholars with an interest in the history of photography, women's studies, Middle Eastern history, and Orientalism.