Welcome back to my Neo-Victorian Voices series in which I review books written in the twenty-first century but set in the nineteenth. This time I’m blogging about Rachel Louise Driscoll’s The House of Two Sisters (2025), published in the UK as Nephthys, which will appeal to fans of Victorian Egyptology.
It’s 1892 and our British heroine, and hieroglyph expert, Clemmie has arrived in Cairo to return a stolen amulet she believes has cursed her family. The novel cuts between Clemmie’s adventures in Egypt, as she traverses the Nile with a band of fellow travelers, and the history of what happened to her Egyptologist father, her beloved sister, Rosetta, and the rest of their family back in England.
The novel is thick with atmosphere—the unravelling of the mummy found with the amulet is a standout scene—and interspersed with tales taken from ancient Egyptian mythology. Details of Clemmie’s travel arrangements, from modes of transportation to touristic clothing, also seem well-researched, transporting readers to nineteenth-century Egypt.
It was these details that I enjoyed most, while the characterization of the novel’s heroes and villains is a little simplistic. Clemmie feels very much like a twenty-first-century rendition of a nineteenth-century protagonist, painfully aware of the harm foreign relic hunters are causing to historic sites and without the racist attitudes and assumptions I would expect of a woman of her background, period, and class.
There is still much to like here—action and romance, reminiscent of The Mummy, lesser-known mythology I was excited to learn about, and a focus on sisterly bonds that helped the novel live up to its American title. Along with Enid Shomer’s 2012 The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, which I reviewed back in 2018, The House of Two Sisters comes recommended for those who want a Victorian #histfic read with an Egyptian setting.
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