Flora Annie Steel

Twenty-two years in India

Flora Annie Steel was born Flora Annie Webster on 2 April 1847 in Sudbury, Middlesex, the sixth child of George Webster. In 1867 she married Henry William Steel, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and for the next twenty-two years she lived in India, chiefly in the Punjab. She threw herself into native life with unusual sympathy for a memsahib of her time: she learned Punjabi, befriended local women, championed girls' schooling, and urged educational reform on the government of India. She served as an Inspectress of Government and Aided Schools in the Punjab, and worked with John Lockwood Kipling — Rudyard Kipling's father — to foster Indian arts and crafts.

Tales of the Punjab

Steel collected folk tales directly from village storytellers and published them in 1894 as Tales of the Punjab, a collection of forty-three stories — including The Tiger, the Brahman and the Jackal, The Lambikin and Bopoluchi — profusely illustrated by Lockwood Kipling. The book remains the definitive English-language anthology of Punjabi folk tales, valued as ethnography as much as literature. A decade earlier she had co-authored Wide-Awake Stories (1884), a collection of Punjab folk tales, with the young army officer R. C. Temple.

Later work and legacy

The family returned to Britain in 1889, and Steel kept writing in Scotland. Her novel On the Face of the Waters (1896), about the uprising of 1857, was a bestseller; she also wrote the story collections From the Five Rivers and English Fairy Tales, the household manual The Complete Indian Housekeeper (1888, co-authored), and the popular history India Through the Ages (1929). A member of the Women Writers' Suffrage League, she died on 12 April 1929 at her daughter's house in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire.