Flora Annie Steel
Novelist | 1847-1929
Flora Annie Webster Steel (1847-1929), author of numerous novels and short stories about India, has been described by scholars as “the female Rudyard Kipling,” implying that her writing was derivative of her renowned male contemporary’s works. Yet Steel’s fiction is no weak imitation of Kipling’s. For a start, it offers a woman’s perspective on British colonial government and Anglo-Indian relations. And furthermore, in their scope and detail, her historical novels rival the Waverley novels written by her countryman, Walter Scott.
Steel spent twenty-two years in India, primarily in the Punjab. Although it was her husband, an engineer with the Indian Civil Service, who brought her to India, she was by no means one of the “memsahibs” whom she mocks in her novels—bored women who spent their days drinking tea, gossiping, and flirting with soldiers. She was too busy learning multiple Indian vernaculars, inquiring into local customs, and, after she was appointed Inspectress of Schools, monitoring the state of basic education across the Punjab. When an official with the Indian Civil Service asked Henry Steel why he couldn’t keep his wife in order, Henry responded by inviting the British governors of the Punjab to take her for a month and try for themselves.
Given her later passion for education, it is interesting that Steel was an autodidact. She was one of eleven children, and while her brothers were sent to school at Harrow, Steel and her sisters remained at Burnside, a rambling house about three miles from Forfar. None of her sisters was close enough to her in age to justify the expense of hiring a governess, so instead Steel was encouraged to read what she pleased from her father’s library—history, philosophy, novels, poetry, and even medical texts—all of which would prove useful in later life. Steel was only twenty, scarcely removed from this idyllic but isolated childhood, when she married Henry in 1867. A week after their wedding, they sailed for Bombay.
The birth of a daughter, Mabel, brought Steel new opportunities to learn the language and customs of the people she lived among. In her autobiography, The Garden of Fidelity, she describes her daughter as “the first link of my subsequent enchainment to the interest of the village women. A baby is ever a good ambassador, and Fazli, the ayah, was an excellent attaché. So most evenings I held a regular court, and I picked up much more of the language than I should have done otherwise” (57). Two decades later, Steel would co-author The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (1888), a guide to help British women recreate as nearly as possible in India the domestic practices that they were accustomed to at home. Drawing on her own experiences after Mabel’s birth, Steel urged British women to learn Hindustani, pointing out that “no sane Englishwoman would dream of living, say, for twenty years, in Germany, Italy, or France, without making the attempt, at any rate, to learn the language” (12). The Complete Indian Housekeeper mustered domesticity in the service of colonialism, claiming that “an Indian household can no more be governed peacefully, without dignity and prestige, than an Indian Empire” (18). It went through several editions, and some of its chapters were translated into Hindu so that the mistresses who followed Steel’s advice on learning the language could read them aloud to their servants.
When it came time to send Mabel to school in England, Steel felt a deep sense of loss that she overcame by throwing herself into new kinds of work. When she learned that the restrictions of purdah prevented many Indian women and their children from receiving medical care from male physicians, Steel began to attend to sick women and children. During the three years that Henry Steel was stationed in the remote district of Kasur, Steel relied on her early reading of medical texts and consultation with doctors who passed through to help her patients. At the same time, she began to teach English to boys under sixteen. Impressed by the boys’ progress, Kasur’s Chief Native Administrator suggested that Steel open a school for girls and women, the first of many such schools that Steel would help to establish. It was thanks to her grassroots efforts at educational reform that Steel was eventually appointed the Inspectress of Schools for a region between Peshawar and Delhi of about 141,000 square miles. She also wrote primers for students, some of which were illustrated by John Kipling, father of Rudyard.
Only after Henry Steel’s retirement and their return to Scotland in 1889 did Steel begin writing fiction. Her earliest stories were published in Macmillan’s Magazine. For the first three years of their correspondence, the magazine’s editor Mowbray Morris was under the impression that his new protégé was a man, a mistake Steel did her best to perpetuate. Steel considered her best novel to be On the Face of the Waters (1896), a story of the Indian Mutiny of 1857. By this time, a number of novels had already been written about the series of localized military rebellions against British colonial authority, all of them representing in lurid terms the dire threat that depraved Muslim rebels supposedly posed to white, Christian womanhood. On the Face of the Waters was different in that Steel tried faithfully, albeit unsuccessfully, to represent British and Indian perspectives sympathetically and without sensationalism.
To all of her undertakings, Steel brought an amazingly energetic efficiency and no-nonsense attitude that seems to have enabled her to sweep away obstacles posed by law and custom, whether British or Indian. But with all her matter-of-fact practicality, Steel was deeply sensitive to the beauties of India’s landscapes and traditions, which brought out her own latent mysticism. She reveals these co-existing sides of her personality when she describes setting sail from Bombay after her husband’s retirement from the ICS. The ship passed through a mass of fronds, of which Steel writes, “Ancient travelers have it that the belt is of sea serpents, set to guard the treasures of Hindustan. We moderns know it as seaweed set in motion by the movements of the microscopic animalcule by which it is infested. I am not sure which is right; but of this I am certain that those travelers who, looking down through the blue water on the brown, restless snaky coils, can see nothing but seaweed had better not go to India. They will see nothing there” (191-92).
Bibliography
Benita Parry, Delusions and Discoveries: India and the British Imagination, 1880-1930 (London: Verso, 1998)
Susmita Roye, ed., Flora Annie Steel: A Critical Study of an Unconventional Memsahib, (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2017).
Indira Sen, Woman and Empire: Representations in the Writing of British India, 1858-1900 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2002).
Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, ed. by Ralph Crane and Anna Johnston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Flora Annie Steel, The Garden of Fidelity, being the Autobiography of Flora Annie Steel, 1847-1929 (London: Macmillan, 1930).
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