Edward G. Browne’s travelogue, A Year Amongst the Persians, stands out in the broader genre of nineteenth-century European travel literature. For historians of the Middle East, European travelogues have long had a double-edged quality to them: on the one hand, they often provide invaluable empirical information. On the other hand, they occasionally suffer from their authors’ biases and prejudices, which color their depictions. In this context, Browne’s travelogue has been described as a “sympathetic” portrayal of late nineteenth-century Iran, and Browne himself has been held up as an example of an Orientalist who did not quite fit the model criticized most forcefully by Edward Said. This paper moves the discussion on Browne forward by exploring a crucial period during which his knowledge of and expertise over Iran’s history, society, and literature was formed. Before traveling to Iran in 1887, Browne’s sole experience in the Middle East had been a summer spent in Istanbul while a student at Cambridge. His knowledge of Persian, and of Iran, derived mainly from his university studies and from evenings spent reading Persian texts while working as a physician. Browne’s election as a fellow to Pembroke College, in 1887, lent him institutional support, but it was only during his extended stay in Iran in 1887-1888 that his understanding of the country’s history and culture began to acquire the depth for which he later became famous. Browne’s unpublished four-volume diaries, which he kept during his travels, offer a window onto the development of a rising scholar. The diaries are replete with anecdotes of individuals Browne met in Iran, and of the information, books, and excursions they shared with him. Browne’s “informants” ranged from members of the Qajar royal family, to Babis, Sufis, geomancers, and dervishes – an extraordinarily diverse group of people. He took the time to record his conversations with these individuals, providing the raw material from which A Year Amongst the Persians was written. These interactions shaped Browne’s early views of Iran’s literature, religions, politics, economy, environment, and food. The picture that emerges is of an enthusiastic, self-assured, and naïve scholar whose work more closely resembles careful ethnographic research than that of his contemporaries, like George Curzon. This paper suggests that the key to appreciating Browne’s travelogue and later scholarship (including his monumental four-volume A Literary History of Persia) is in his ability to empathize with his contacts in Iran during his sojourn in the country.