Imperial Women Writers in Victorian India

Representing Colonial Life, 1850-1910

This book is about Victorian women’s representations of colonial life in India. These accounts contributed to imperial rule by exemplifying an idealized middle-class femininity and attesting to the Anglicisation of the subcontinent. Writers described familiarly feminine modes of experience, focusing on the domestic environment, household management, the family, hobbies and pastimes, romance and courtship and their busy social lives. However, this book reveals the extent to which their lives in India bore little resemblance to their lives in Britain and suggests that the acclaimed transportation of the home culture was largely an ideological construct iterated by women writers in the service of the Raj. In this way, they subverted the constraints of Victorian gender discourses and were part of a growing proto-feminism.