BOOK REVIEW / Fragments from real-life Arabian Nights: 'Lucie Duff Gordon' - Katherine Frank: Hamish Hamilton, 17.99

KATHERINE Frank's biography of Lucie Duff Gordon opens on the day of its subject's birth with a couple of short, vivid sentences: 'London, 24 June 1821: a brilliant early summer's day. In Queen Square, Westminster, Big Ben can be heard tolling the hour.' Place, time, season, and sound are evoked with a verbal economy designed to produce a sense of immediacy. The tolling clock also plays a metaphorical role: biography is a journey back in time.

The only trouble is that Big Ben did not exist in 1821. You would have had to wait until 1858 to hear it tolling the hour. It may be unfair to point out this trifling slip in a book which is otherwise so hard to criticise. But it helps to make the point - conceded by Katherine Frank herself - that however lifelike any biography appears to be, it can never offer more than a partial truth. The sense of here-and-now reality achieved by biographies such as this is almost as dependent on the writer's imagination as the realism found in novels.

Katherine Frank's greatest strength, in fact, is her imagination, which enables her to breathe life into the scattered fragments that Lucie Duff Gordon left behind her when she died of TB in Cairo at the age of 48. Remembered particularly for her Letters From Egypt, Lucie had exiled herself from her family in England seven years earlier in search of life and health in the warmer climate of North Africa. In the end, she found neither, but she did find fulfilment among the people of Luxor, engaging in their culture, and recording her impressions of what she called 'the real Arabian Nights'.

Dressed in Arab fashion without stockings or stays, Lucie was happy in her final years to dispense with the norms of Western etiquette. Yet her early life was in some ways just as unconventional. An only child of free-thinking parents, she was not given any religious education until she was sent to a stifling girls' boarding school at the age of 15. Her father, John Austin, was a nervous Casaubon-like legal theorist, too depressive to hold down a job for long. Her mother, Sarah, became the main breadwinner, translating books and engaging in an erotic postal affair with one of the authors, the rakish Prince Puckler-Muskau. With few acquaintances her own age, Lucie's childhood friends were those of her parents - the aging Jeremy Bentham, JS Mill, and Heinrich Heine, whom she met in Boulogne.

At 19, Lucie married Alexander Duff Gordon, a young baronet with only a small salary from his job at the Treasury. The couple became prominent in literary circles: their friends included the Carlyles, Dickens, Thackeray and Tennyson, who appears briefly, subjecting the company to punitive full-length readings from Maud. She had four children, including a little boy who died in infancy. And two of her friendships foreshadow her ultimate love affair with Muslim culture. Both are tragic and delicately traced by Frank. Hatty, a Sudanese boy turned out by his master, appeared on the Duff Gordons' doorstep one December. He was taken in and treated as one of the family until he died of the consumption which eventually killed Lucie. Azimullah Khan, an Indian Muslim in his twenties, was different - urbane, charming, educated. Lucie could never come to terms with his later implication in the massacre of Westerners during the Indian Mutiny.

Lucie was strikingly free of the colonial attitudes of her time, and sought out cross- cultural friendships on a basis of equality. Katherine Frank's emotional involvement with this humane and fascinating woman never tips over into sentimentality. Her prose is fluid. In descriptive passages, it has the luminous ability to bring what she depicts well into focus in the mind's eye. Not only does she have an imagination sympathetic enough to see into the heart of her subject: she also has a travel-writer's appreciation of how to deploy detail.