Akhenaten

Although a potential figure of fun, the Edwardian Akhenaten was also rele­vant to topical issues that were debated in novels, particularly religious questions. Alternative religions were a major cultural phenomenon at the end of the nine­teenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. One of their characteristic features was an interest in eastern mysticism ancient and modern, especially Egyptian and Tibetan. The success, at various times, of Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism, Spiritualism and various types of Theosophy showed how much public appetite there was for new and exotic forms of religious belief to supple­ment or replace orthodox forms of Christianity. People involved in religious and social reform were often attracted to them. Akhenaten has an obvious part to play here. He was seen as a charismatic figure, and a common thread of early twentieth-century alternative religions was the presence of a central revelatory figure, a sort of guru. His teachings also seemed progressive and relevant, yet not too far from Christianity: reassuringly western, in fact, like those who had reinterpreted eastern philosophies to produce Theosophy and Anthroposophy. ^b

Akhenaten's religion could easily be seen as pointing the way ahead in an imperi­alist world which was obsessed with materialism and had lost a proper sense of human values. This is the tenor of two very interesting novelistic treatments of the Akhenaten legend, A Wife out of Egypt

(1913) and There Was a King in Egypt (1918) by Norma Lorimer (1864-1948).

Lorimer, though now long out of print and forgotten, was a very successful writer in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The British Library catalogue lists thirty-four books by her, and her Akhenaten novels went into sev­eral cheap two-shilling editions after enthusiastic reviews. A beautiful and thrill­ing romance', said The Daily Sketch

of There Was a King in Egypt. Lorimer was a fine writer, with a gift for dialogue and the sensuous description of landscape. She deserves to be better known. Her forte was romance and travelogue spiced with a dash of mysticism, and her Egypt novels are part of a sub-genre of romances with Egyptian settings that were very popular in late Victorian and Edwardian times.¹⁷

Their Egyptian settings reflect the growth of tourism to Egypt and its popularity as a honeymoon destination. But Lorimer also cared passionately about the political situation in modern Egypt. She was enraged by Muslim dis­crimination against the Christian Copts, but even more by the patronising atti­tude of the British colonialists to the Egyptians. 'He hadn't the slightest idea of what he really meant by the word natives, whether Mohammedans, Copts, Greeks or Persians', she writes of one of her characters. Unusually, Lorimer's fiction presents the physical remains of the pharaonic past as a token of the future possibilities of an Egypt governed by its own people, rather than as a symbol of the lost glories it would never regain. She is also sharply critical of unimaginative reactions to ancient monuments nourished by books of the Sunday School type, which can only see the biblical parallels. In this context, Akhenaten is useful for Lorimer's political agenda, as a great figure of the glorious past, but with pro­gressive ideas that are applicable to the modern world. He is an exemplar both for political and for religious advancement.

Stella, the heroine of A Wife out of Egypt

, looks European but is in fact racially other, a 'passing girl'. Born in Egypt of Armenian-Syrian parentage, she has been educated in London, where she falls in love with the handsome and aristo­cratic officer Vernon Thorpe. Stella is dark, cosmopolitan and polyglot, Thorpe blond, conventional and narrow-minded, 'one of the unimaginative Englishmen whose good looks are accentuated by Saxon colouring and an almost Hellenic devotion to physical training'.¹⁸ He and Stella sail out to Egypt to meet her family, and she attempts to fire him with some of her enthusiasm for Egyptology. Lorim­er hints that Stella, as a woman of mixed ethnicity who is forced by society to dissimulate, finds Akhenaten a particularly attractive figure because he too was a marginal being, out of his time. In a conversation between Vernon and Stella at the temple of Luxor, Lorimer elaborates on Akhenaten's political and religious importance to Stella :

When they came across cartouches and reliefs which had obviously been