The 'memsahibs' of the British Raj in India are well-known figures
today, frequently depicted in fiction, TV and film. In recent
years, they have also become the focus of extensive scholarship.
Less familiar to both academics and the general public, however,
are the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precursors to the
memsahibs of the Victorian and Edwardian era. Yet British women
also visited and resided in India in this earlier period,
witnessing first-hand the tumultuous, expansionist decades in which
the East India Company established British control over the
subcontinent. Some of these travellers produced highly regarded
accounts of their experiences, thereby inaugurating a rich
tradition of women's travel writing about India. In the process,
they not only reported events and developments in the subcontinent,
they also contributed to them, helping to shape opinion and policy
on issues such as colonial rule, religion, and social reform. This
new set in the Chawton House Library Women's Travel Writing series
assembles seven of these accounts, six by British authors (Jemima
Kindersley, Maria Graham, Eliza Fay, Ann Deane, Julia Maitland and
Mary Sherwood) and one by an American (Harriet Newell). Their
narratives - here reproduced for the first time in reset scholarly
editions - were published between 1777 and 1854, and recount
journeys undertaken in India, or periods of residence there,
between the 1760s and the 1830s. Collectively they showcase the
range of women's interests and activities in India, and also the
variety of narrative forms, voices and personae available to them
as travel writers. Some stand squarely in the tradition of
Enlightenment ethnography; others show the growing influence of
Evangelical beliefs. But all disrupt any lingering stereotypes
about women's passivity, reticence and lack of public agency in
this period, when colonial women were not yet as sequestered and
debarred from cross-cultural contact as they would later be during
the Raj. Their narratives are consequently a useful resource to
students and researchers across multiple fields and disciplines,
including women's writing, travel writing, colonial and
postcolonial studies, the history of women's educational and
missionary work, and Romantic-era and nineteenth-century
literature. This volume includes two texts, Ann Deane, A Tour
Through the Upper Provinces of Hindostan (1823) and Julia Maitland,
Letters from Madras (1846).
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