There is no record of what happened to her after she left Lucie’s household Sally Naldrett disappears from history entirely.
There are no known images, drawn, painted, or photographed, of Sally. While Duff Gordon’s life is well known through both her own writing, Letters from Egypt, and Katharine Frank’s wonderful biography, very little is known about her two servants, Omar, and her maid, Sally Naldrett. For me, writing a historical novel based on a true story was all about finding ways to leap into the territory of fiction. It’s a formal studio portrait, but Omar’s pose is amusing, and his half-smile makes him look like a young Will Smith. There is a photograph of Omar Abu Halaweh, her Egyptian manservant, and I spent a lot of time staring at that photo, trying to see into his soul. Of the three main characters in my novel, only Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, has a range of portraits, from sketches done when she was a child, to Henry Phillip’s portrait which still hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. The great and good were forever having portraits of themselves commissioned, from line drawings to magisterial oil paintings, but representations of servants are few and far between. By Kate Pullinger There are few images of British domestic servants from the Victorian period.
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