The mills and boon memsahibs: women's romantic indian fiction 1877-1947

This thesis examines the published written work of eleven different women. The material is principally in the form of romantic novels but short stories form a significant minority along with poetry, autobiography, history, and contemporary political comment. The vast majority of the work was published between 1877 and 1947. All but one of the writers spent extended periods in India and numerous of their works have never been discussed in any critical work of which I am aware.

The material is discussed under broad thematic headings which serve to throw light upon the similarities between these writers. Indeed similarity and continuity are ideas which underpin much of this study's impact in that it concludes by challenging the notion, prevalent in most other discussion of Anglo-Indian material, that one can divide the corpus up into distinct and separate periods.

As well as concluding through thematic analysis that the chronological periods used by other commentators are not applicable in this instance, the current work challenges the dominant image of India, its climate, people and imperial significance, drawn from the writings of men like Kipling, Forster and Orwell. The study concludes that this image (which I call the canonical image) is utterly inappropriate when measured against the writings of these women. Their work is, I conclude, in certain important respects counter-canonical.