Miss Fane in India

(Isabella Fane, only daughter of General Sir Henry Fane, accompanied her father to India on his appointment as Commander-in-Chief in 1835 and spent three years acting as his hostess. Her letters home and her journal during this period make intriguing reading, rich in human and historical interest. They are a fascinating record of a lost experience and also a corrective to the notion that all English women in India were straitlaced memsahibs, snobbish, imperious and racially prejudiced. Containing a wealth of domestic and social detail, complete with intimate revelations about mosquito bites and boils, and entertainingly acid comments about some of her distinguished contemporaries, Isabella Fane's writings introduce us to an attractive and distinctive literary voice and give us a rare picture of a vanished world. Miss Fane to a sarcastic Jane Austen type... refreshingly free from conventional attitudinising -Victoria Glendinning, Sunday Times)