Description
Book SynopsisFlora Annie Steel (1847–1929) was a contemporary of Rudyard Kipling and rivaled his popularity as a writer during her lifetime, but her legacy faded due to gender-biased politics. She spent 22 years in India, mainly in the Punjab. This collection is the first to focus entirely on this “unconventional memsahib” and her contribution to turn-of-the-century Anglo-Indian literature. The eight essays draw attention to Steel’s multifaceted work—ranging from fiction to journalism to letter writing, from housekeeping manuals to philanthropic activities. These essays, by recognized experts on her life and work, will appeal to interdisciplinary scholars and readers in the fields of British India and Women’s Studies. Contributors: Amrita Banerjee, Helen Pike Bauer, Ralph Crane, Gráinne Goodwin, Alan Johnson, Anna Johnston, Danielle Nielsen, LeeAnne M. Richardson, Susmita Roye
Trade Review"[The editor] gathers essays on the writer contemporaries called 'the female Rudyard Kipling' (p. xii). The wife of a Civil Service officer who lived in India for twenty-two years, Steel learned some of the local languages and improved the lives of Indian women by providing medical aid and establishing girls’ schools. The essays in this volume treat topics ranging from Steel’s rewriting of women’s role in the maintenance of British power to her sympathetic representation of the wit and creativity of Indian girls. The essays also reveal the generic range of Steel’s writing, from her letters to newspapers to intervene in social policy to her use of cookbook writing to suggest analogies between domestic and colonial management." -- Andrea Henderson * Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 (Autumn 58, 4) *
"There are eight essays by different hands on Steel (1847–1929), whom her contemporaries regarded as highly as Kipling but who subsequently faded into obscurity due to ‘the gender-biased politics of canonization’.... Each essay in this fascinating collection, which concludes with a useful index (pp. 211–24), is followed by notes and an alphabetically arranged enumerative listing of ‘Works Cited’: there are black and white illustrative figures scattered throughout the text." -- William Baker * The Year’s Work in English Studies, Volume 98, Issue 1 *
"Going beyond Steel’s most famous and widely discussed work, On the Face of the Waters, this excellent volume strives to shed light on her less well-known novels, such as The Potter’s Thumb and Voices in the Night: A Chromatic Fantasia, as well as her short fiction and other genres of her writing that have not received much attention from literary critics, including housekeeping advice, journalism, and letters to editors." -- Ira Raja * Oxford University Press Journals,Volume 98, Issue 1 *
“The volume consists of individually strong essays that shed new light on undiscovered aspects of Steel as a writer, covering the entire gamut of her writing life…. [It] exemplifies the value of microstudy with attention on the particular, helping to raise important, larger points about the general. This volume is essential reading for scholars of gender, literature, cultural studies, South Asian studies and imperial histories, and is highly recommended for anthropologists, scholars of British history and those interested in the intersections of race, class and gender.” [Full review at DOI: 10.1177/0262728020944769] -- Radha Kapuria * South Asia Research Vol. 40(3) *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction / Susmita Roye 1 | Women Who Serve in Times of Need Recreating an Uprising in Flora Annie Steel’s Voices in the Night DANIELLE NIELSEN 2 | The Other Voice Agency of the Fallen Women in Flora Annie Steel’s Novels AMRITA BANERJEE 3 | Narrative Strategy as Hermeneutic Reading In the Permanent Way as Colonial Theory LEEANNE M. RICHARDSON 4 | Flora Annie Steel and Indian Girlhood HELEN PIKE BAUER 5 | The Transgressing Purdahnashin and Violated Purdah Space Kipling’s “Beyond the Pale” and Steel’s “Faizullah” SUSMITA ROYE 6 | “Going Jungli” Flora Annie Steel’s Wild Civility ALAN JOHNSON 7 | How to Dine in India Flora Annie Steel’s The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook and the Anglo-Indian Imagination RALPH CRANE AND ANNA JOHNSTON 8 | “Yours truly, Flora Annie Steel” Gender, Empire, and Indian Pressure Politics in the Times’s Correspondence Columns, 1897–1910 GRÁINNE GOODWIN Contributors Index
