The Amelia Peabody series is a series of twenty historical mystery novels and one non-fiction companion volume written by Egyptologist Barbara Mertz β under the pen name Elizabeth Peters. The series is centered on the adventures of the unconventional female Egyptologist Amelia Peabody Emerson , for whom the series is named, and an ever-increasing number of family, friends, allies, and characters both fictional and based on historical figures.
The novels blend mystery and romance with a wryly comic tone, and at times also parody Victorian-era adventure novels such as those written by H.
Rider Haggard. The series was published between and , with the final, posthumous novel completed by Joan Hess appearing in Amelia Peabody is introduced in the series' first novel, Crocodile on the Sandbank , as a confirmed spinster, suffragist, and scholar, living in England in She inherits a fortune from her father and leaves England to see the world, with the side benefit of escaping various suitors and family members who were neither aware that she would be the sole beneficiary of her father's estate nor that he had amassed a small fortune over the course of his lifetime.
In Rome, Amelia meets Evelyn Barton-Forbes, a young Englishwoman of social standing who has run off with and subsequently been abandoned by her Italian lover, and the two make their way to Egypt. There they meet the Emerson brothers, Egyptologist Radcliffe and his philologist brother Walter.
Over the course of the first book the couples pair up: Amelia marries Radcliffe referred to throughout the series by his last name "Emerson" , and Evelyn marries Walter.
