118. MARIE BENEDICT RETURNS: A two-timeline tale of a female pharoah chiseled out of history

This week on LiteraryHype Podcast, Marie Benedict returns. Her conversation in episode 68 was the most-downloaded episode of 2025, and she's challenging you all to make this one do even better.

Marie's newest book is Daughter Of Egypy, which is about a female pharoah named Hatshepsut and the female archaeolgist, Lady Evelyn Clarke, who went in search of her tomb and found something even bigger. Both women saw their accomplishments diminished, and Marie explores what may have gone down in history. We're talking all about the book, her trips to Egypt, and her efforts to tell the story correctly.

Links to come.

Transcript

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00;00;03;03 - 00;00;09;05
Unknown
Hi and welcome to the Literary Hype Podcast. I am Stephanie, your literary hype moment back with another author conversation.

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Unknown
And today's author is apparently one that you guys really enjoyed.

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Unknown
I'll tell you all about the milestone during the interview. But just now, this is kind of a big deal to have this author back.

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Unknown
Marie Benedict is a historical fiction writer who unearths women's stories from the past, especially women who've had their accomplishments overshadowed or kind of taken by men. And so today we're getting a double dose of that with an actual archeological dig involved.

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Unknown
Daughter of Egypt is about two women, one being a very famous female pharaoh and one being a woman who went off in search of finding her tomb.

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Unknown
But Marie will tell you all the details much better than I ever could. So without any further ado, here's my conversation with Marie Benedict.

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Unknown
Hi. Hi. Welcome back to Literary Hype. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you so much for having me. Well, I'm super excited to have you back, because I don't know if you know this, but you were my number one most downloaded podcast of 2025.

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Unknown
Come on. That's not true by far. Oh my gosh, thank you so much. So now we got to set a new record. Well please. We got to keep it. Keep it coming. Keep it going. I got some good competition for for 2026 because I hit all right with the, finding your finding Her Edge author for that was on Netflix, and that one popped off.

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Unknown
So you've got it. You've got your work cut out. You know what? You just threw the gantlet down. So let's make this happen. Let's do it. That's awesome. Thank you for telling me. So this time you are here talking about a book you told us about a little bit last time. Daughter of Egypt. So for anybody who hasn't already seen this online, what is this book about?

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Unknown
when our story opens. Lady Evelyn Herbert of Highclere Castle, which is the real Downton Abbey, is setting off to Egypt with her father, Lord Carnarvon. And the archeologist Howard Carter. They are in especially. Evelyn is in search of the tomb of the only female pharaoh, Hatshepsut.

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Unknown
As they set out and take multiple seasons to try and find it, we as readers learn a lot about who Hatshepsut Hatshepsut was, how she rose up to become a pharaoh, really quite against the rules and rituals of her time.

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Unknown
And then why, in the years after her death, she was systematically erased. Like. And I don't mean that metaphorically. I mean, like, literally someone took a chisel and, like, took out her likeness, her name, all throughout the monuments of Egypt. So we're learning that as Lady Evelyn is on the hunt for her actual tomb, and they do find an incredible tomb.

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Unknown
But it is not the tomb that she hopes for. They actually find the tomb of Tutankhamen and Lady Evelyn is, in fact, one of the very first people inside. What was it about the story of these two women that really compelled you to write this one? Well, Hatshepsut has kind of been with me for a really long time.

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Unknown
I have been fascinated, like a lot of people, with ancient Egypt since I was a kid. And I, you know, I'm I'm a history nerd. I'm always kind of gathering information, dipping into research. And as I continue to do that, as I got older, college, law school, even when I was practicing law, that's when I came across Hatshepsut, and I just thought it was fascinating that this woman really broke the mold.

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Unknown
Right. And I became really curious about how she did it. And she did have a very specific kind of methodology for doing it. And she ended up having one of the most peaceful, successful reigns in all of Egyptian history. She was the most prolific builder. We have so many things left behind that she's built, and I just was really fascinated with who she was and how she came to be this incredible figure.

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Unknown
And then the mystery of her erasure was so compelling as well. So she'd been with me for a long time, but I was never sure how to tell her story, and I didn't know if I really wanted to tackle it exclusively because the erasure part doesn't happen until after her death. And if I'm telling the story of her life, I'm never going to get to that.

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Unknown
So I was looking for another way into her story, offering a different perspective. And I've always been fascinated with this era of archeology. From the kind of late 1800s into the early 1900s. It was kind of the wild west of archeology. We think of archeology today as like very systematic, very academic. That is not what it was like.

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Unknown
If you had the money to buy a commission, you could go dig and you split the proceeds 5050 with the Egyptian government. So it was just it really kind of was the Wild West. And, and for a woman, evil and evil and Carter to get kind of involved in it and to make this amazing discovery. That was an incredible story itself.

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Unknown
And so when I realized that there was, as someone put a recently connective tissue between those two stories, I knew that that was really the moment The Daughter of Egypt was born.

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Unknown
It's so interesting how you weave these two stories together, because they are very different times, very different voices. What was the challenge for you in finding each woman's unique voice?

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Unknown
that was a challenge. I mean, I've written, several other books set in the interwar period in and around England and until, well, each woman is totally different. I knew a lot of the kind of things that they were experiencing, certain nuances of the way they lived. And so it was a little bit easier to get into Lady Evelyn's mindset and really understand the things that were influencing her on the day to day.

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Unknown
I mean, everyone's different, but I had a better sense. It was harder to leap into Hatshepsut's world. And, unlike a lot of the women I've written about, of course we have a lot. We actually do have a lot of, artifacts left behind from Hatshepsut, but it's not like I have letters that she wrote or her journal.

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Unknown
You know, I don't know that she did. That was 30, 500 years ago. So I had to extrapolate more from the historical record. I, I really had to get an understanding of her life, the belief systems of the times, and really try to understand who she was as a character based on, based on kind of the very different paths she carved for herself.

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Unknown
So it took a little bit more of a, of an effort, and it was definitely more of a leap for me to do that.

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Unknown
When you're trying to extrapolate someone's story and their perspective like that. Does it get to you a little bit like the nerves of like, oh, is this going to be wrong? Is someone going to get on my case about this?

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Unknown
Yeah. How do you handle that? Yeah. It's something that's always in your heads, you know, and sometimes you you have more courage of your convictions and a more comfort level. I think in this particular case, it was more of a leap with Hatshepsut. And, I did, you know, my own research. I constructed my own story, but I did have a consultant.

00;06;56;29 - 00;07;02;04
Unknown
I did work with this incredible Egyptologist. Her name is doctor JJ Shirley. She's a

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Unknown
Editor of the Journal of Ancient Egypt. She runs an excavation, in the Valley of Nobles in Luxor, which is right near the Valley of the Kings. So she is a an incredible person. One of her areas of expertise is this time period.

00;07;15;08 - 00;07;36;14
Unknown
And Hatshepsut. So she was really kind of my external current is, you know, when I was faced with a crossroads and trying to decide which pathway to take for my character, I could talk it out with her. And one of the things I learned about this time period was that, you know, there's a limitation to what we can know for certain because of the limitations on the historical record.

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Unknown
But there are certain things there's a perimeter of possible things, possible pathways. And that really helped me forge my story. You know, she would she would say, you know, these these are the choices. There's two things you've offered. Either one could have been the possible outcome or the possible approach to this situation. Which suits your story more.

00;07;58;29 - 00;08;06;04
Unknown
And so it kind of gave me, it gave me the exterior impetus to make some of the choices that I had to make.

00;08;06;07 - 00;08;17;26
Unknown
Last time I asked you about the research process for your previous book and what interesting details you came across in that one, and those were really fun. So did you have any extra special details that you learned about these women?

00;08;17;26 - 00;08;35;13
Unknown
Oh my gosh. I mean, there were so many fascinating things about these women. And I mean, I have to say, I did have to go to Egypt, of course, which was like darn terrible, oh darn horrible. And Highclere Castle, which you know, people know is Downton Abbey, and I'm sure it looks exactly like it does on TV.

00;08;35;16 - 00;08;38;05
Unknown
And that is how it looked during Lady Evelyn's time as well.

00;08;38;05 - 00;09;06;13
Unknown
And I actually, a fun fact is, I did actually get a tour from Lady Carnarvon herself. The Carnarvon family. Has that's been their family seat since the 1670s. Evelyn's. Evelyn's father was Lord Carnarvon. And the Carnarvon still owned Highclere Castle. So, you know, I got a lot of really interesting kind of snippets and tidbits that, you know, she shared that are kind of family lore and some of those things kind of work their way into the book.

00;09;06;15 - 00;09;26;24
Unknown
And in terms of Hatshepsut, there were so many fascinating things. I mean, you know, just one small fact that when the book opens, Hatshepsut is involved in a she was not only a princess, her father was, pharaoh most of the first, and she eventually marries, of course, her brother, because they married siblings, she became queen.

00;09;26;24 - 00;09;55;10
Unknown
And then ultimately she becomes Pharaoh. But when the book opens, she's a princess. But she's also a priestess. She's the highest level of priestess in Egyptian society. She's called the gods wife of Amon, and Amon is like kind of the head of the pantheon of gods. And every single day of her life, she has to rise before dawn and, undertake a multi-hour ritual to awaken the gods so that the sun will rise in the sky.

00;09;55;13 - 00;10;15;26
Unknown
And knowing that about her life and knowing like that, that was part of her every day. And they believed that that was part of their belief system. Like, we have to do this thing. It it really gave me insights into how much she would have felt rested on her shoulders, how responsible she would have felt to her people, to her country.

00;10;15;28 - 00;10;28;26
Unknown
And so just that one aspect of her existence, so heavily ritualized, so, so onerous, really, in many ways really gave me a very special insight into who she was.

00;10;29;03 - 00;10;37;27
Unknown
You've called yourself like an excavator of women's stories, their history. And this book actually involves excavation. It's like who I always wanted to be.

00;10;38;00 - 00;10;45;21
Unknown
So what's it like for you as someone who loves archeology and refers to yourself like that, to work on a story that involves actual excavation?

00;10;45;26 - 00;11;20;22
Unknown
It's like the culmination of of a dream that started in my childhood, right? I mean, there were definitely times when I, you know, wanted to be an archeologist when I envisioned myself as like a female Indiana Jones. Like a fun fact is, the of the Egyptologist. I work with Doctor Shirley that that's that was her. Her gateway to becoming an actual archeologist was the Indiana Jones movies, you know, and what's what's so full circle about that for me is that in some ways, it wasn't the only gateway, but it was one gateway to imagining a different life for me came from fiction.

00;11;20;24 - 00;11;46;12
Unknown
And after a circuitous path, I eventually came back to exploring history through fiction. And for Doctor Shirley as well. It was the Indiana Jones movies. It was fiction that opened up that possibility for her, and she chose a different path from it. But at the end of the day, it tells it really shares how important stories are, how how they allow us to envision different lives and different possibilities for ourselves.

00;11;46;12 - 00;12;04;04
Unknown
So, I mean, that was just such a such a like full circle moment to write about these women, to write about a time period and a woman I've always imagined, and then to work with an actual Egyptologist who many months out of the year does an excavation and see kind of imagine that life for myself.

00;12;04;05 - 00;12;17;01
Unknown
I mean, you really did get to imagine this for yourself by going there. And I saw some pictures of you holding the ark at some of these sites. What was it like for you to put the visuals into the world that you were creating?

00;12;17;08 - 00;12;38;03
Unknown
It was everything, quite honestly. I mean, it's one thing to see the images, and I felt this, you know, I've been to most of the places that I've written about in my books and, you know, these both of these places, that the, the mortuary temple and Luxor are the places that Hatshepsut created. And Highclere Castle in, in England.

00;12;38;06 - 00;13;12;19
Unknown
Those are places that are intimately tied to the women I wrote about. Not every book I write has one place that really is defining for that, for that woman and these these settings in these places really were. And so to actually walk where they walked, breathe the sort of air that they breathed. Right. Experience the sense in the sounds of the, of their lives really brought them, brought a spark to their I hope to their characterization that it would have been very difficult for me to otherwise.

00;13;12;19 - 00;13;34;11
Unknown
I mean, Hatshepsut in particular, you know, her mortuary temple in Luxor, for example, like, I've seen a million pictures of it, but nothing really prepared me for for encountering it myself. The size, the scale, the scope, the fact that this was her tribute, really, and it is considered one of the archeological wonders of the world. And she left this behind.

00;13;34;11 - 00;13;41;14
Unknown
And then every mention of her almost was erased from it. You know, it just really brought home the magnitude of what happened to her.

00;13;41;19 - 00;13;54;25
Unknown
You posted a lot of photos of different pieces that were relevant to this story. Which photo do you feel like is people need to pay the most attention to when they're reading this story, to have that visual in their head?

00;13;54;27 - 00;14;11;12
Unknown
Well, I mean, for me, of course, I love the ones of like me. Like I really was here, I promise. But there's one image that for me, it's a picture I took. I don't know how great of a picture it is, but it's. And there's a I have posted a lot of these images, but there's one that's really striking.

00;14;11;15 - 00;14;31;24
Unknown
As I mentioned, Hatshepsut was literally chiseled out of the book of reliefs, monuments, whole, whole chapels were destroyed, basically like brought to rubble, statues, colossal statues broke into miniature pieces. You know, a lot of that's been painstakingly reconstructed, but there's a lot of reliefs.

00;14;31;24 - 00;14;35;21
Unknown
is basically like on a stone wall, it's it's a carving into the wall.

00;14;35;23 - 00;15;01;22
Unknown
They're very commonly used in Egyptian, structures, and they're decorative, but they're also meant to tell a story. And very often the ones about Hatshepsut talk about the trade routes. She opened the the expansion of her borders. It really is celebrating her legacy and also justifying her rule, how her rule was divinely blessed, how kind of. Even though she was a woman, she was it was appropriate for her to have this role.

00;15;01;24 - 00;15;27;27
Unknown
And a lot of these reliefs still exist, especially at, her mortuary temple in Luxor. And you can see on them there'll be a beautiful, series of images and there'll be a blank spot. Right. And that's where Hatshepsut was. But there's one from a structure. It's a smaller chapel, maybe just a small temple. At the Karnak temple, which is a complex also in Luxor.

00;15;27;29 - 00;15;52;23
Unknown
And it's a huge depiction of Hatshepsut, a relief. And you can still see very small individual chisel marks like they went to town on, on eliminating her, but were so careful about it. And that picture, I think, sums up her erasure. It's so clear how important it was to dig out every last evidence of her, every last piece of her.

00;15;52;25 - 00;16;17;10
Unknown
And, it really lays bare how someone you'll have to read the book. Someone, was determined to erasure from history. And that's such an important theme in all my books. You know, all the women I've been I've written about have been erased in some fashion or another, or some portion of their lives have been erased. And so it's it's that picture, really sums it up.

00;16;17;12 - 00;16;35;26
Unknown
you touched on Downton Abbey. Yeah. And there's another fun little Downton Abbey connection with your audio book. Oh, yeah. So talk a little bit about getting Bessie Carter to come back to do the audio book and how this comes like Downton Abbey Bridge Circle. Yeah. So Bessie Carter is an incredible English actor. She's been in many things.

00;16;35;26 - 00;17;01;03
Unknown
She's she plays Prudence on Bridgerton. She actually starred as Nancy Medford, who I also wrote about in a series called outrageous. She has narrated this audiobook, and in part we also have, a wonderful, voice actor do Hatshepsut. She narrated Queens of Crime. But what what's extra cool is that her father actually was one of the most important characters of Downton Abbey.

00;17;01;03 - 00;17;12;15
Unknown
He played Carson, right? Yeah. So I just love that, you know, like she probably has been to Highclere Castle and the Downton Abbey set, like, 10 million times. So it's just really a fun fact about about the narration.

00;17;12;17 - 00;17;22;19
Unknown
Did she bring anything extra to the book? I mean, I know it's normally done by the time the audiobook narrators get into it, you're like, oh yeah, well, like this little detail here, I wish.

00;17;22;19 - 00;17;35;25
Unknown
No, but, you know, she is so talented. And she is able to bring in such a multiplicity of characters to life in such a powerful way. I just felt really lucky that she wanted to do this one, too.

00;17;36;02 - 00;17;43;14
Unknown
There's a scene in the book, man, about 100 pages in where they're doing a painting, or carving, but there's that.

00;17;43;16 - 00;18;04;29
Unknown
You talk about the colors and what they represent, what color represents you? Oh, that's a great question. I think I have a lot of colors. I mean, blue is my favorite color. But there's something about red that I love. I can't say there's an any one color that represents me, but you're right. In ancient Egypt, colors had very distinct meanings.

00;18;05;02 - 00;18;10;25
Unknown
And that's another thing that was really just kind of wonderful to learn about. As I was doing the research for this book.

00;18;10;28 - 00;18;26;11
Unknown
What are you working on now? Well, I do have a co-written book with Victoria Christopher Murray. It's done. It comes out at the end of June. It's called A Pair of Aces. About the first, black woman prosecutor in New York City in the 1930s.

00;18;26;14 - 00;18;54;05
Unknown
And, her time period working with the most famous madame of her day, white woman by the name of Polly Adler. She was a, Jewish immigrant to this country. And these women came together across the, you know, they were on opposite sides of the law. They were it led very different lives. But they came together to bring down the famous mobster Lucky Luciano, and get him convicted, which was, like, unprecedented for the time

00;18;54;09 - 00;19;02;29
Unknown
Awesome. Can't wait to read it. You and last question we always ask because this is literary hype. What books are you happy about? Right now? Oh my gosh, so many books.

00;19;03;01 - 00;19;08;11
Unknown
I just finished reading an absolutely phenomenal book by it. I was lucky enough to get an early copy.

00;19;08;11 - 00;19;32;02
Unknown
I'm sure everyone will be reading it this summer. By Maggie O'Farrell, who wrote Hamnet. It's called land. It's her new book that comes out in June, and it's really complicated to describe, but it is set in the post Irish Famine years, and it's about a family, but it's about so much more than that. And it just really I mean, it's beautifully written, of course, but really resonated with me because that's very much my own family's history.

00;19;32;02 - 00;19;34;22
Unknown
And so it was just a really beautiful, powerful read.

00;19;34;29 - 00;19;48;00
Unknown
How many sacrifices did you have to make to get that arc? Yeah. It wasn't the easiest. I did beg, borrow and steal, and I usually don't do that. But this one I really, really wanted to read and I'm so glad I did. So I highly recommend that. Awesome.

00;19;48;00 - 00;19;54;10
Unknown
Well, thanks so much for hanging out with literary. Hi. Thank you for having me. It's always a pleasure,

00;19;54;12 - 00;20;08;09
Unknown
Thanks again to Marie for hanging out with me at the Saint Louis County Library, and to the library for allowing us to have this conversation and film it before her event. If you want to get Ahold of Daughter of Egypt or we talked a little bit about Queens of Crime, so you can check that out down there as well.

00;20;08;09 - 00;20;10;00
Unknown
Those links are in the show notes for you.

00;20;10;06 - 00;20;17;06
Unknown
If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to subscribe to the Literary Hype Podcast. Give us some stars, leave a comment and share it with your friends.

00;20;17;13 - 00;20;19;29
Unknown
Thanks so much for listening to the Literary Hype podcast.