![]() ![]() The Smith sisters were born in 1843, in Irvine, Scotland, and raised with stern enlightenment by their very wealthy widowed father, who, as Soskice reports, “educated his daughters more or less as if they had been boys.” In particular, he promised his daughters that he would take them to every country whose language they learned, a pact that, given the happy combination of the twins’ love of both languages and travel, resulted in their mastery of French, German, Spanish and Italian at a young age. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai desert resulted in the electrifying discovery of one of the oldest manuscripts of the Gospels ever found. As Janet Soskice makes clear in “The Sisters of Sinai,” figuring among the ranks of such adventurous seekers were Agnes and Margaret Smith, identical Scottish twins, whose travels to St. ![]() These included the explorer Richard Burton, who brought back to mother England not only geographical information from Africa and Arabia, but also translations of Oriental erotica and Mary Kingsley, whose travels in equatorial Africa made her an enlightened amateur scholar of African fetish beliefs not to mention Charles Darwin, whose travels in South America rewrote the history of the world. puts it, of “prudishness and high moral tone,” the Victorian age abounded with adventurers intent on intellectual discovery. Despite its popular characterization as a period of stultifying stuffiness or, as the O.E.D. ![]()
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