Harriet Tytler was the only woman present at the siege of Delhi in 1957, the most crucial encounter of the Indian Mutiny. l857. Her unique eyewitness account of the siege and description of her life in India are remarkable as much for their compelling readability as for their historical significance. A woman of singular courage and independence, Harriet Earle was born into an army family in India and at the age of nineteen married Captain Robert Tytler, a widower ten years her senior. Her memories of childhood in India and England before the Mutiny are vivid with incident, and her suffering at the hands of a tyrannical aunt molded a strong and resilient personality. No adventure story could be more exciting than the tale of her dramatic escape from Delhi at the outbreak of the Mutiny. Eight months pregnant at the time, with her husband, two children and French maid she returned to witness the three-month British siege of the city, during which she gave birth to a son, subsequently christened Stanley Delhiforce. Her memoirs tell a fascinating personal story that illustrates very well the attitudes and assumptions of the English in India.

'Sharply observed, snappily written and thoroughly researched, She Merchants provides a fabulous panorama of a largely ignored area of social history. Katie Hickman successfully challenges the stereotype of the snobbish, matron-like memsahib by deploying a riveting gallery of powerful and often eccentric women ranging from stowaways and runaways through courtesans and society beauties to Generals' feisty wives and Viceroys' waspish sisters. It is full of surprises and new material and completely engaging from beginning to end' William Dalrymple The first British women to set foot in India did so in the very early seventeenth century, two and a half centuries before the Raj. Women made their way to India for exactly the same reasons men did - to carve out a better life for themselves. In the early days, India was a place where the slates of 'blotted pedigrees' were wiped clean; bankrupts given a chance to make good; a taste for adventure satisfied - for women. They went and worked as milliners, bakers, dress-makers, actresses, portrait painters, maids, shop-keepers, governesses, teachers, boarding house proprietors, midwives, nurses, missionaries, doctors, geologists, plant-collectors, writers, travellers, and - most surprising of all - traders. As wives, courtesans and she-merchants, these tough adventuring women were every bit as intrepid as their men, the buccaneering sea captains and traders in whose wake they followed; their voyages to India were extraordinarily daring leaps into the unknown. The history of the British in India has cast a long shadow over these women; Memsahibs, once a word of respect, is now more likely to be a byword for snobbery and even racism. And it is true: prejudice of every kind - racial, social, imperial, religious - did cloud many aspects of British involvement in India. But was not invariably the case. 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.

The Englishwoman’s Review, which published from 1866 to 1910, participated in and recorded a great change in the range of possibilities open to women. The ideal of the magazine was the idea of the emerging emancipated middle-class woman: economic independence from men, choice of occupation, participation in the male enterprises of commerce and government, access to higher education, admittance to the male professions, particularly medicine, and, of course, the power of suffrage equal to that of men. First published in 1979, this twelfth volume contains issues from 1879. With an informative introduction by Janet Horowitz Murray and Myra Stark, and an index compiled by Anna Clark, this set is an invaluable resource to those studying nineteenth and early twentieth-century feminism and the women’s movement in Britain.