Arabi and His Household

In 1882, Lady Gregory traveled to Egypt and encountered Ahmed Arabi, the army officer who had become the symbol of Egyptian resistance to British expansion. What she found contradicted everything she had read in the British press. Rather than the dangerous fanatic depicted in London newspapers, Gregory met a man of genuine warmth and conviction, surrounded by a household of complex, resilient women his political enemies had no interest in understanding. This short, impassioned work reads less like history than testimony from someone who actually sat in Arabi's home, spoke with his mother and wife, and emerged convinced that the British Empire was manufacturing a villain. Written in the immediate aftermath of the British bombardment of Alexandria and Arabi's eventual exile, the book functions as both personal memoir and polemical correction. It endures as a fascinating artifact of one Englishwoman's attempt to see beyond imperial propaganda, and as a rare contemporary record of how Arabi's family experienced the collapse of Egyptian sovereignty.