How to get a fictional character named after you? Be outstanding.
That’s what Amelia Edwards was.
Mystery writer Elizabeth Peters named her character, Amelia Edwards, after Amelia Edwards. Both the fictional character and Edwards were explorers who loved Ancient Egypt.
Edwards didn’t start as an outstanding explorer. She was first a British journalist and successful novelist. After her parents died, she began traveling. She fell in love with Egypt and wrote about her first expedition there in A Thousand Miles Up the Nile in 1877.
This book is still mentioned in scholarly journals today.
What drove Edwards? Passion.
In A Thousand Miles Up the Nile, she describes being at the colossus statue of Ramesses II at Abou Simbel and noticed leftover plaster stuck on the face of the statue from casts made by explorers more than a half century previously.
That was intolerable. So under the direction of her boat’s captain, the crew assembled a makeshift scaffolding of oars and wood and cleaned away the plaster chunks.
But some of the plaster could not be removed without damaging the statue.
So they dipped sponges on sticks into specially-made strong coffee and dyed the remaining plaster.
Edwards wrote it was “a sight more comic than has ever been seen at Abou Simbel before or since.”
Passionate, intelligent, and funny. I’d have love to know her.