This book is about Victorian women's representations of colonial life in India. These accounts
contributed to imperial rule by exemplifying an idealized middle-class femininity and attesting
to the Anglicisation of the subcontinent. Writers described familiarly feminine modes of
experience focusing on the domestic environment household management the family hobbies and
pastimes romance and courtship and their busy social lives. However this book reveals the
extent to which their lives in India bore little resemblance to their lives in Britain and
suggests that the acclaimed transportation of the home culture was largely an ideological
construct iterated by women writers in the service of the Raj. In this way they subverted the
constraints of Victorian gender discourses and were part of a growing proto-feminism.
