Flora Annie Steel

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Publishing from the 1880s through the first three decades of the twentieth century, FAS 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,
Steel, Flora Annie. “Introduction”. The Best Short Stories of Flora Annie Steel, edited by Saros Cowasjee et al., Indus, p. i - xvi.
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often unmediated by any western presence. She also published history, a pamphlet on women's rights, and a vivid if impressionistic autobiography. FAS '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.
Powell, Violet. Flora Annie Steel: Novelist of India. Heinemann.
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Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

1896

FAS published On the Face of the Waters, a novel about the Indian Mutiny of forty years before.
It seems to have reached print early in the year.
Richardson, LeeAnne Marie. “<span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>On the Face of the Waters</span>: Flora Annie Steel and the Politics of Feminist Imperialism”. Silent Voices: Forgotten Novels by Victorian Women Writers, edited by Brenda Ayres, Greenwood, pp. 119-38.
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OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.

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.
Powell, Violet. Flora Annie Steel: Novelist of India. Heinemann.
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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.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Biography

Birth

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.
Powell, Violet. Flora Annie Steel: Novelist of India. Heinemann.
1-2
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.