Leila Hosnani

Egyptian Coptic Woman

Leila Hosnani’s story is told in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet (published 1957-1960). We meet her through the eyes of the young diplomat Mountolive, who is visiting the beautiful farm Karm Abu Girg outside of Alexandria where Leila lives with her ailing husband and two grown sons. They are Christian Copts, very proud, who have been the “brains” of Egypt, doing much of the administrative work of the country.

Leila had been a brilliant student, had hoped to become a doctor. But for an Egyptian woman born between the two world wars, this not possible. Leila is obedient, pliant, and loyal. She marries into a family which her parents arrange for her. Her life must belong to Egypt. “Whether she was happy or unhappy she herself had never thought to consider. She was hungry, that was all, hungry for the world of books and meetings which lay forever outside this old house and the heavy charges of the land.”

Thus Leila becomes that age-old archetype of woman, a woman of experience who accepts that her work and natural gifts might not be appreciated in the great world of politics, culture, academia or even art; but knows that this world cannot get on without her; knows what a woman is to men and that her life lies in the areas of graciousness, civility, intimacy and beauty. Such a woman crafts a place for herself at the heart of her household that only she can fill: rooted in family, with children, representing that family to the world with grace, ensuring civility, showing to younger people that it is okay; that life, that being a woman is worth the pain. 

Leila settles into the “rambling old-fashioned house built upon a network of lakes and embankments near Alexandria.” She subscribes to books and periodicals in the four languages she knows besides her native Arabic, and goes into the city of Alexandria for the occasional holiday. But she does not appreciate shallow society and becomes introspective.

Leila begins to live through her smooth and attractive son Nessim, who runs the family banking and shipping businesses. Her other son Narouz runs the farm as her much-older husband suffers from increasing muscular atrophy. Mountolive, a young British foreign service officer, is invited to stay on the farm for a summer to improve his Arabic. He and Leila ride out into the desert together at her husband’s suggestion. They have an affair. “Only I must not fall in love,” Leila tells Mountolive.

When Mountolive is posted to other countries, Leila begins a correspondence with him. With their difference in ages, she had not expected their affair to last, but distance frees them. “She kept pace with his growth in those long, well-written, ardent letters which betrayed only the hunger which is as poignant as anything the flesh is called upon to cure: the hunger for friendship, the fear of being forgotten.”

When Leila’s husband dies, she considers meeting Mountolive in Europe, but that summer she contracts smallpox, which “melted down the remains of her once celebrated beauty.” Leila buys heavy black veils and retires to a life in the summerhouse on the farm where she reads and writes with a tame snake for company. She tells Mountolive not to pity her and begs him to write as gaily as before.

In the third book of his quartet, entitled Mountolive, Durrell reveals the plot at the bottom of all of them, which Nessim has conceived for the sake of the Copts, together with the Armenians, Jews and Greeks in Egypt, as a defense against being engulfed by the Arab tide. He believes that the British have turned the Moslems against them and he has been aiding the Jews in their fight against the British in Palestine, providing arms. This is the basis for his marriage to Justine. He has many covers for this plot. Leila is finally told of it.

In the resolution of this complex tale, Mountolive comes back to Egypt as British ambassador. Leila, who has resisted seeing him, finally meets Mountolive to beg for Nessim’s life, as she is convinced that he has been found out and will suffer. This is humiliating for both of them. The British do prevail upon the Egyptian police, but Nessim has successfully bribed them. Nessim sends Leila to a family farm in Kenya, but Narouz will not leave. The Egyptian police come for him and assassinate him instead of Nessim.

We do not learn more of Leila, though the fortunes of the Hosnani family suffer and we must assume she shares in this. I have always been fascinated by the resignation and the dignity with which Leila conducts herself after her disfiguring illness. And in re-reading this book I finally came to see Durrell’s value. It is not just the lush language for which he is justly celebrated. Or the varieties of love which he describes, including all the cynicism which resulted from the wars when European nations were thrown into chaos with ramifications all over the world. It is also that he can flesh out the meaning and motives of characters with whom he is not naturally in sympathy. The Hosnani family is richly drawn.