Imperial Women Writers in Victorian India: Representing Colonial Life, 1850-1910

Éadaoin Agnew

jun 2017 · Springer

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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.

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Éadaoin Agnew is Senior Lecturer at Kingston University, UK. She studied her BA at Trinity College, Dublin before completing her MA and PhD at Queen’s University, Belfast. She has previously published articles on the travel writing of Lady Hariot Dufferin and Marianne North, and book chapters on travel writing in nineteenth-century Ireland. She is currently working on a scholarly edition of two women travel writers - Mrs A. Deane's A Tour through the Upper Provinces of Hindostan (1823) and Julia Charlotte Maitland's Letters from Madras During the Years 1836-39, by a Lady (1843) - to be published in 2018.