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• 1 2026-07-09T11:40:50+00:00 Fiction by Western Women in Colonial India 26 Overview and links to Fiction by Western Women in British India plain 2026-07-28T11:33:33+00:00 The text on this page was written by Sana Asifriyaz, July 2026.  
  
  There were several prominent Western women who penned works of fiction about colonial India. Among them were B.M. Croker, an Irish author who wrote many novels set in India, including Diana Barrington: A Romance of Central India (1888) and Her Own People (1905); Sara Jeannette Duncan, a Canadian author and journalist who wrote both novels and collections of short stories, such as The Pool in the Desert (1903) and The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib; and Flora Annie Steel, an Englishman who lived in India for a number of years and authored the well-known Mutiny novel On the Face of the Waters (1896). She is also the author of The Potter's Thumb (1900), as well as domestic guides for British women living in Indian households. Another prominent voice -- inspired by B.M. Croker -- was F.E. Penny, who published many novels set in India, including A Mixed Marriage and Caste and Creed. 
  
  Many works by Western women fiction writers could be grouped in the romance genre. And many of these texts explored interracial romance. (See our topic page on interracial romance and the mixed-race Anglo-Indian community here.) Maud Diver’s Lilamani (1911), which follows the romance between an Indian woman and an English baronet, is one of many such examples. 
  
  However, just as it is safe to say that not all Western women authors wrote romance fiction, some of those who included romantic elements in their work produced fiction that could hardly be considered romance solely. Sara Jeannette Duncan’s The Pool in the Desert, for instance, which includes short stories centering on romantic plots, is one of her many works that can be more substantially characterized by a “New Woman” style, which explores the emerging archetype of the independent woman, changing gender roles, and alternatives to the heteronormative marriage plot. 
  
  The New Woman style perhaps speaks to the difficulties women writers overcame in order to publish their work. Valerie Sander’s essay “Woman, Fiction and the Marketplace” in Joanne Shattock’s Women and Literature in Britain 1800-1900 (2001) observes the challenges women writers faced in literary careers, which were formidably male-dominated spaces. Joyce Kay’s 2007 essay “‘No Time for Recreations Till the Vote is Won’? Suffrage Activists and Leisure in Edwardian Britain” discusses women writers like Flora Annie Steel who joined women-only professional writing groups, which later became spaces for women to champion not only women’s literary careers but also women’s suffrage.
  
  Finally, Julia Keuhn's chapter "Desire, Love and Mixed-Race Children: Plotting Anglo-Indian Popular Fiction" in her book A Female Poetics of Empire: From Eliot to Woolf (2013) has an in-depth treatment of Anglo-Indian domestic novels written by such authors as B.M. Croker and Alice Eustace.
  
  Here is a selection of texts by Western women who wrote fiction set in British India:
  
  Maud Diver, Lilamani
  Maud Diver, Captain Desmond, V.C.
  Maud Diver, The Great Amulet
      Detailed Summary of The Great Amulet
  Maud Diver, Far to Seek: A Romance of England and India
      Detailed Summary of Far to Seek
  Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Pool in the Desert
      Detailed summary of "A Mother in India"
  Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib
      Detailed Summary of The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib
  Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Story of Sunny Sahib
      Detailed Summary of The Story of Sunny Sahib
  Sara Jeannette Duncan, Hilda: A Story of Calcutta
      Detailed Summary of Hilda: A Story of Calcutta
  B.M. Croker, Diana Barrington: A Romance of Central India 
      Detailed Summary of Diana Barrington
  B.M. Croker, A Family Likeness: A Sketch in the Himalayas
      Detailed summary of A Family Likeness
  B. M. Croker, The Company's Servant: A Romance of Southern India
      Detailed summary of The Company's Servant
  B.M. Croker, Her Own People
      Detailed summary of Her Own People
  Flora Annie Steel, On the Face of the Waters 
      A good account of this novel at Wikipedia
  Flora Annie Steel, The Potter's Thumb
       Detailed Summary of The Potter's Thumb
  Alice Elizabeth Dracott, Simla Village Tales, Or, Folk Tales from the Himalayas
  Alice Eustace, A Girl from the Jungle
  Alice MacDonald Fleming, A Pinchbeck Goddess (at The Kiplings and India)
  Maxwell Gray, In the Heart of the Storm  
  F.E. Penny, Caste and Creed
  F.E. Penny, A Mixed Marriage
      Detailed Summary of A Mixed Marriage
  F.E. Penny, The Outcaste
      Detailed Summary of The Outcaste
  Alice Perrin, East of Suez
      Detailed Summaries of the stories in "East of Suez" 
  Alice Perrin, The Anglo-Indians
      Detailed summary of The Anglo-Indians
  Alice Perrin, Woman in the Bazaar
  Alice Perrin, Star of India