This month Chair of Virago Press, Lennie Goodings, chatted to Katie Hickman about her new book: She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen: British Women in India 1600 – 1900.  

She-Merchants, Buccaneers and Gentlewomen is an extraordinary and illuminating book that tells the incredible stories of the first British women to set foot in India - 250 years before the Raj.

In this landmark book, celebrated chronicler, Katie Hickman, uncovers stories, until now hidden from history: here is Charlotte Barry, who in 1783 left London a high-class courtesan and arrived in India as Mrs William Hickey, a married 'lady'; Poll Puff who sold her apple puffs for 'upwards of thirty years, growing grey in the service'; Mrs Hudson who in 1617 was refused as a trader in indigo by the East Indian Company, and instead turned a fine penny in cloth; Julia Inglis, a survivor of the siege of Lucknow; Amelia Horne, who witnessed the death of her entire family during the Cawnpore massacres of 1857; and Flora Annie Steel, novelist and a pioneer in the struggle to bring education to purdah women. 

For some it was painful exile, but for many it was exhilarating. Through diaries, letters and memoirs (many still in manuscript form), this exciting book reveals the extraordinary life and times of hundreds of women who made their way across the sea and changed history.

Find out more: https://www.littlebrown.co.uk/titles/katie-hickman/she-merchants-buccaneers-and-gentlewomen/9780349008264/

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.