Sarah Belzoni

Egypt

In Egypt the two of them lived sometimes in boats and at other times in temples. Her husband would leave her alone for periods of weeks or months and she would be left to speak with the local women around her in whatever language they spoke. She spent this time documenting the lives of the local women, eventually publishing Mrs. Belzoni's trifling account of the women of Egypt, Nubia, and Syria as part of her husband's 1820 work Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries … in Egypt and Nubia. Her work was the first of its kind on the topic. The couple returned to Luxor, where Belzoni left Sarah in an Arab house, unable to speak the language and without an interpreter. The village women crowded to look at her, going on to help her through an attack of ophthalmia. After a long campaign, her supporters eventually secured a £100 a year pension for her by 1851.

Sarah Belzoni died in Jersey on 12 January 1870, and was buried there, with a simple gravestone.