![]() ![]() “I would run my hand along his cheek if I could reach that high,” she tells us. Who was Sally Naldrett? In Pullinger’s novel, which won the 2009 Governor General’s Award in Canada, she is a 30-year-old spinster who on her one day off a month troops to the British Museum to view the statue of a huge pharaoh. Duff Gordon’s response to the birth was to try to separate Sally from the child and send her back to England. Little is known about Sally, save for the fact that she became pregnant and that the child’s father was said to be an Arab man. ![]() “A hot dusty complicity between Lady, maid and manservant” - this is the tantalizing dynamic Kate Pullinger places at the center of her novel “The Mistress of Nothing.” The lady is a figure from real life, the Victorian author Lucie Duff Gordon, best known for her “Letters From Egypt.” Stricken with tuberculosis and in search of a more benign climate, she left her husband and family back in Esher, England, and traveled to Egypt with her maid, Sally Naldrett, whom Pullinger has chosen as her narrator. ![]()
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