TIGERS,DURBARS AND KINGS-Fanny Eden’s Indian Journals 1837-1838 Edited by JANET DUNBAR

Fanny Eden’s natural habitat was a drawing room in one of the great Whig country houses. Yet the shrewd irony, perceptiveness and immediacy of her writing show how she was stimulated by the jungles and plains of India. Here is a witty, stylish Jane
Austenesque lady
“strolling about on an elephant’, as she puts it, and quizzing India with tolerant amazement, before recording it all in her journals and sketches. She was determined to make the most of it, whether on a
‘modest’ tiger-shooting trip with only 260 attendants and 20 elephants, or crossing the whole of Northern India as one of the 12,000 who accompanied her brother, the Governor-General, on his visit to the last great King of the Sikhs, Ranjit Singh.
Hers is a thoroughly un-Victorian approach, with none of the earnestness and arrogance which disfigure so many later memsahibs’ accounts. Indeed, the freshness and élan of her Journals make them a match for her sister Emily’s parallel account, Up The Country, long one of the classic books of British India.