Flora Annie Steel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_Annie_Steel Flora Annie Steel (2 April 1847 – 12 April 1929) was an English writer who was noted for writing books set in British India or otherwise connected to it.

She was born Flora Annie Webster in Sudbury, Middlesex, the sixth child of George Webster. In 1867, she married Henry William Steel, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and for the next twenty-two years lived in India (until 1889), chiefly in the Punjab, with which most of her books are connected. She grew deeply interested in native Indian life and began to urge educational reforms on the government of India. Mrs Steel became an Inspectress of Government and Aided Schools in the Punjab and also worked with John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard Kipling's father, to foster Indian arts and crafts. When her husband's health was weak, Flora Annie Steel took over some of his responsibilities.

She died at her daughter's house in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire on 12 April 1929. Her biographers include Violet Powell and Daya Patwardhan.

Writing

Flora Annie Steel was interested in relating to all classes of Indian society. The birth of her daughter gave her a chance to interact with local women and learn their language. She encouraged the production of local handicrafts and collected folk-tales, a collection of which she published in 1894.

Her interest in schools and the education of women gave her a special insight into native life and character. A year before leaving India, she coauthored and published The Complete Indian Housekeeper, giving detailed directions to European women on all aspects of household management in India.

In 1889 the family moved back to Scotland, and she continued her writing there. Some of her best work, according to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, is contained in two collections of short stories, From the Five Rivers and Tales of the Punjab.

Her novel On the Face of the Waters (1896) describes incidents in the Indian Mutiny. She also wrote a popular history of India. John F. Riddick describes Steel's The Hosts of the Lord as one of the "three significant works" produced by Anglo-Indian writers on Indian missionaries, along with The Old Missionary (1895) by William Wilson Hunter and Idolatry (1909) by Alice Perrin. Among her other literary associates in India was Bithia Mary Croker.

http://orlando.cambridge.org/public/svPeople?person_id=steefl

Publishing from the 1880s through the first three decades of the twentieth century, Flora Annie Steel produced some thirty books. Most of her novels describe contemporary Anglo-Indian life, though some are set in Britain (seldom in England) and five are historical novels about India (four of those being about the relatively distant time of the Mughal emperors, and one of them called by its author a biography). Of about eighty-five short stories collected in her successive volumes of short fiction, a number present, with imaginative sympathy, "virtually every facet of Indian life," Bibliographic Citation link. often unmediated by any western presence. She also published history, a pamphlet on women's rights, and a vivid if impressionistic autobiography. Flora Annie Steel's India is that of the British Raj, a place where sharply distinct cultures remain essentially unaffected by close contact, often erotic, between members of different races and religions. FAS has nothing but scorn for Anglos who cannot adapt to India, but also deep anxieties for Indians adapting to western ways. Milestones 2 April 1847 Flora Annie Webster (later FAS) was born at Sudbury Priory (then in Sudbury Park) near Harrow on the Hill in Middlesex, the sixth child and second daughter among eleven (or ten surviving) children. Bibliographic Citation link. 1896 FAS published On the Face of the Waters, a novel about the 'Indian Mutiny' of forty years before. Bibliographic Citation link. scholarly note link. 12 April 1929 FAS died at the house of her daughter and son-in-law at Minchinhampton in Gloucestershire (where she had been living), of heart failure. Bibliographic Citation link. Later 1929 FAS's autobiography, The Garden of Fidelity, which she had begun in her eighties and left unfinished at her death, was published later in the year she died.