Memsahib
Caroline Moorehead
Flora Annie Steel: Novelist of India Violet Powell (Heinemann pp. 170, £8.50) Flora Steel made the right decision when she agreed to marry a man she barely knew, and certainly was not in love with, and set sail; on a sharp winter's day in 1868 for the Indian subcontinent. It is very likely that Victorian England would never have provided her with enough outlets and challenges for her immense resourcefulness, just as the Northern skies might never have awoken in her an extreme and surprising love of exoticism. As it was, she became the best selling chronicler of the Mutiny, and the subject now of a biography by Violet Powell.
The India Flora Steel set foot on at Madras was not that of cosseted tea parties and a gentle yearning for home. As a junior official in the Indian Civil Service, Henry Steel was not in a position to offer that, and Flora in any case was infinitely bored by all limitations. She followed her husband everywhere, from remote country station to isolated camps, practised rudimentary medicine with women and children and taught, appalled by the low standards of English that she encountered. 'However irritating Flora's habit of crying, "I can do that" might be observes Violet Powell, 'it undeniably stood her in good stead.'
By temperament, Flora was a meddler, quick to notice and just as quick to point out bureaucratic inefficiencies; she was also fair and not without courage. Created Inspector of Schools in her own right, 'Steel's baby bride', as her childish fair curls had made her known, she instigated an enquiry into corrupt examination practices at the University of the Punjab, which put her own life into some danger.
She was, of course, very often right. But it is impossible not to feel a certain sympathy for the Secretary-to-Government who asked Steel in despair if he could not keep his wife in order, or for Steel who suggested that the official should take her himself for a month and try. Her attitude to the Prince of Wales's visit to Lahore was typical. She lent the piano lovingly brought out with her for his entertainment, but charged for the loan when the authorities charged her for lighting and sanitation that did not reach the Steel's encampment. They had chosen, it need hardly be said, to set it far from the others.
Henry Steel retired in 1889. Flora returned to England with him, to take up family life with her daughter Mable, born in India but sent home to grow up. But in 1894 she went back, this time on her own, to fulfil an old dream. By now the author of some well received short stories, as well as the somewhat unexpected The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, she wanted mate rial for something larger. As Violet Powell shows, she was as conscientious and insis tent in her research as in all else. She settled in Kasur and observed life from the rooftops; she went to stay with an Indian family in Lahore, and then trudged the streets of Delhi in memory of the Mughals.
Finally, she was given permission to examine the sealed boxes of confidential papers dealing with the Mutiny. As later 'historians confirmed, she made the most of the opportunity. She returned home, to a rented house in the Highlands, with what Violet Powell calls a 'literary harvest' which was to inspire her for the rest of her very long life. When she was not writing, she campaigned — women's suffrage, taxation, anything that seemed to her to lack fairness. On the Face of the Waters was published in 1896, 40 years after the Mutiny, but at a moment of intense imperial pride. It made a literary lioness of its author, and was still in print over 30 years later. Inevitably, Flora Steel was compared to Kipling.
Speaking of her honeymoon, Flora Steel wrote, 'My distaste for realities was over borne by a desire to understand'. Violet Powell conveys this robust curiosity with great skill, showing her heroine to be both forceful and humane, bossy, yet clever enough to make it acceptable. The book is at its most enjoyable and immediate in the settings and scenes of India — of which there could, with pleasure, be many more—, at its most distant in the detail of plots and sub-plots of Flora Steel's novels. These are inevitably somewhat dry, even if they give proof of Flora's essentially romantic vision of stalwart British officers and doomed Anglo-Indian sexual relationships. Her own preferences, characteristically, lay . with bounders.
A round, purposeful face stares out of the photographs taken of Flora Steel: it does not change with age. The thin lips are not exactly smiling, but the expression is genial; enough, at least, to temper an extremely steely look. Violet Powell is not always an easy writer, demanding, with her tight-knit prose and economic style, considerable discipline of a reader. But the tone, with that edge of critical affection which seems to check Flora's wilder interferences, suits her subject well.
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