An Egyptian’s Wife

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28920, 13 June 1959, Page 3

An Egyptian’s Wife

Seven Years in the Sun. By Rhoda Gordon Amine. Robert Hale. 185 pp. This is an engaging pifece of autobiography with which the reader should persist, undeterred by such discouragements as a passage in the foreword running “As the plane touched down at Wadi Haifa—climatically speaking, Wadi Hellfire, on the way, I felt, to Khartomb.” (Mrs Amine demands that the second syllable of “Khartomb” be given the emphasis of italics.) This sort of thing, the reader will soon discover, is merely an example of the infuriating affections with which Mrs Amine sprays her story. Her style is often that of the letterwriter of the Victorian age. Exclamation marks abound, and where the Victorian lady would underline words, Mrs Amine uses italics. This is a great pity. The style is an anachronism, for Mrs Amine’s story is very much of the present day, and it is a strange style for a woman of Mrs Amine’s background. Born Rhoda Gordon Lingard, she lived in China as a girl, attending an international school in Shanghai. After returning to England and working in the Civil Service for a few years she developed a mathematical bent and took a good science degree. She renounced the practice of science and went to Egypt as a teacher in a girls’ school. There, after a time, she met and married Osman Amine, Professor of Philosophy at Cairo University. Dr. Amine, a graduate of the Sorbonne, was a village boy, and his village and humble family retained a strong hold on him even when he moved in high academic circles in Cairo. Dr. Amine’s frequent visits to his village and family broaden his wife’s autobiographical accounts of her life in Eggypt from that of one living in middle-class intellectual circles to include one life with peasant families. Mrs Amine gives clear and informative accounts of the woman’s status in Egypt, and she gives as good a popular account as one can recall of the woman’s place in a modern Mohammedan society. Mrs Amine had opportunities also to observe at first hand some of the great events of contemporary Egypt. She was there during the revolution, during the Egyptian Government’s seizure of the Suez Canal, and during the British-French action at Pori Said. From a position of advantage she is able to describe the reactions of ordinary Egyptians tc these events. At times her judgments have tc be taken with a grain of salt, sc obviously is she influenced by her associates, and for a scientist she is remarkably inclined to disregard relevancies that might embarrass her path to a simple exposition of the rights and wrongs of simple problems. Nevertheless, there are many more times when Mrs Amine shows hersell to be a most competent observer, and a very shrewd psychologist. Mrs Amine tells us that she wrote her book when she left Egypt on a visit to England. But on the publisher’s blurb we are provoked by suggestions that Mrs Amine was not allowed to return to Egypt to her family and to her two children “of whom she felt she had been cheated.” The last paragraph of the publisher’s blurb, with cryptic references to another book which will, presumably, explain all, hardly plays fair with readers of the present book.