Bithia Mary Croker

Bithia Mary Croker (née Sheppard, 28 May 1847 – 20 October 1920) was an Irish novelist most known for her works concerning life and society in British India. She also wrote ghost stories.

Life

Croker was born in 1847 in Warrenpoint, County Down, Northern Ireland.Rosemary Cargill Raza: "Croker, Bithia Mary (c. 1848–1920)", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography''
(Oxford, UK: OUP, 2004) Retrieved 30 October 2015. Pay-walled. Her birth year was not publicly known for a long time, which is why later years are also stated sometimes. She was the only daughter of Rev. William Sheppard, the Anglican Church of Ireland rector of Kilgefin, County Roscommon, who was an ex-barrister, and Bithia Mary Sheppard. Her younger brother William Harry Cope Sheppard went on to become president of the Dublin rugby union club Wanderers F. C. Her father died in 1855 after a protracted illness, when Bithia was eight years old. She spent parts of her childhood in Roscommon and was educated at Rock Ferry, Cheshire and in Tours, France. She became famous as a horsewoman with the Kildare Hunt.''The Feminist Companion to Literature in English'', eds Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (London: Batsford, 1990), p. 248.

In 1871, she married John Stokes Croker, an officer in the Royal Scots Fusiliers and later the Royal Munster Fusiliers, in Rathangan, County Kildare,The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women's Writing
accessed 24 October 2024 and they lived there for some time in Oakley House.Gerry Boland
Roscommon Literary Heritage Series 6 – B.M. Croker
accessed 24 October 2024. Soon after, Croker followed her husband to Madras and then to Bengal. Exclusive of trips home, she lived in India for 14 years between 1872 and 1892.Helen C. Black
''Mrs. Croker''. In: ''Pen, Pencil, Baton and Mask. Biographical Sketches.''
1896, page 89. Accessed 30 October 2024. Her only child, Gertrude Eileen Celeste Croker, was born in Bangalore in December 1872 and baptized in Madras in January 1873. Eileen was later also educated at Rock Ferry, married Albert Edward Whitaker and was appointed MBE. Croker spent some time in the hill station of Wellington now in Tamil Nadu, where she wrote many of her works, having begun to do so as a distraction during the hot season. After her husband's retirement with the rank of lieutenant-colonel in 1892, the couple moved to Lordello House in Shankill (not Bray, County Wicklow, as often stated) south of Dublin, then to London, and finally to Folkestone, Kent, where her husband died in 1911. Croker remained immensely interested in reading, travel and theatre. She died at 30 Dorset Square, London, on 20 October 1920 and was buried in Folkestone.

Writing

Croker's prolific literary career spanned 38 years, from 1882 when she was 35 years old, until her death in London in 1920. Her last novel, ''The House of Rest'', was published posthumously in 1921. She wrote 42 novels and 7 volumes of short stories.

Her first novel, ''Proper Pride'' (1882), was written secretly in Secunderabad in 1880, then read aloud to other women. After she had sent the original manuscript to an editor and hadn't heard back for many months, she thought it was lost, rewrote it from memory and eventually had it published anonymously in the UK. Thought to be by a man, it received good reviews and had been reprinted 12 times by 1896. William Ewart Gladstone was observed reading it in the House of Commons. The book, according to a present-day account, "shows open sympathy with the male viewpoint and metes out punishing treatment to its spirited, horse-riding heroine, whose distrustful pride separates her from her devoted husband."

Croker's work has been praised in general for "a sensitive ear for speech, for idiom and the diction of different classes, which she reproduces in lively and entertaining dialogue." Tension often derives from threats to conventional order in society. Her second novel, ''Pretty Miss Neville'' (1883), credited to her as B. M. Croker, was as popular as the first. The burden of social convention for a woman in India unwilling to marry the man for whom she has been sent out is explored in ''The Cat's Paw'' (1902), and that of a man who sinks socially in ''The Company's Servant'' (1907). Her ''Village Tales and Jungle Tragedies'' (1895) reflect a parallel interest in Indian rural life. Altogether 17 of the novels were set in India, one in Burma, and seven in Ireland. One of her novels set in Ireland, ''Terence'' (1899), was adapted for the stage and ran for two years in the United States.

There are intimations of Gothic fiction in some of Croker's work. Her 1905 story ''The Little Brass God,'' for example, involves a statue of Kali, described as a "goddess of destruction", who brings various misfortunes on the Anglo-Indians who possess it. The curse is dispelled when the statue is stolen from them and dropped down a well.

It has been claimed that her 1917 novel ''The Road to Mandalay'', set in Burma, was the uncredited basis for the 1926 American silent film of the same name directed by Tod Browning, of which only a 35 min version has been restored. However, the similarities between the two works are less than striking and possibly coincidental.

Several of Croker's novels appeared in German, Czech, French, Spanish, Hungarian, Swedish and Norwegian translations. She was the most published author in the popular German low-budget edition ''Engelhorns allgemeine Romanbibliothek'' (''Engelhorn's general novel library,'' 1884–1930), with 31 of her novels and story collections published in German translations, ahead of German Richard Voss (25) and French Georges Ohnet (21).

Croker had a wide literary acquaintance in London. Her novel ''Angel'' (1901) was dedicated to another novelist whose work centres on India: Alice Perrin. The author and academic Douglas Sladen went so far as to call her, with her "valued friends" Perrin and Flora Annie Steel, "three who have long divided the Indian Empire with Rudyard Kipling as a realm of fiction. Each in her own department is supreme."

A volume of her ghost stories was edited by Richard Dalby at the turn of the millennium. Her story ''To Let'' (c. 1893) was included in ''The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories''.

Bibliography

Novels

*''Proper Pride: A Novel'' (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1882, 3 vol.)
*''Pretty Miss Neville'' (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1883, 3 vol.)
*''Some One Else'' (London: Sampson Low, 1885, 3 vol.)
*''A Bird of Passage'' (London: Sampson Low, 1886, 3 vol.)
*''Diana Barrington: A Romance of Central India'' (London: Ward and Downey, 1888, 3 vol.)
*''Two Masters: A Novel'' (London: F V White, 1890, 3 vol.)
*''Interference: A Novel'' (London: F V White, 1891, 3 vol.)
*''A Family Likeness: A Sketch in the Himalayas'' (London: Chatto and Windus, 1892, 3 vol.)
*''A Third Person: A Novel'' (London: F V White, 1893, 2 vol.)
*''Mr Jervis'' (London: Chatto and Windus, 1894, 3 vol.)
*''Married or Single?'' (London: Chatto and Windus, 1895, 3 vol.)
*''The Real Lady Hilda: A Sketch'' (London: Chatto and Windus, 1896, 1 vol.)
*''Beyond the Pale'' (London: Chatto and Windus, 1897, 1 vol.)
*
Miss Balmaine's Past
' (London: Chatto and Windus, 1898, 1 vol.)
*''Peggy of the Bartons'' (London: Methuen, 1898, 1 vol.)
*''Infatuation'' (London: Chatto & Windus, 1899)
*''Terence'' (London: Chatto and Windus, 1899, 1 vol.)
*''Angel: A Sketch in Indian Ink'' (London: Methuen, 1901, 1 vol.)
*''The Cat's Paw'' (London: Chatto & Windus, 1902)
*''Johanna'' (London: Methuen & Co., 1903)
*''The Happy Valley'' (London: Methuen & Co., 1904)
*''Her Own People'' (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1905)
*''A Nine Days' Wonder'' (London: Methuen & Co., 1905)
*''The Youngest Miss Mowbray'' (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1906)
*''The Company's Servant: A Romance of Southern India'' (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1907)
*''The Spanish Necklace'' (London: Chatto & Windus, 1907)
*''Katherine the Arrogant'' (London: Methuen & Co., 1909)
*''Babes in the Wood'' (London: Methuen & Co., 1910)
*''Fame'' (London: Mills and Boon, 1910) Jarndyce Booksellers' catalogue ''Women Writers 1795–1927 Part I: A–F'' (London, Summer 2017).
*''A Rolling Stone'' (London: F. V. White & Co., 1911)
*''The Serpent's Tooth'' (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1912)
*''In Old Madras'' (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1913)
*''Lismoyle'' (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1914
*''Quicksands'' (London: Cassell and Company, 1915)
*''Given in Marriage'' (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1916)
*''The Road to Mandalay. A Tale of Burma'' (London: Cassell & Co., 1917)
*''A Rash Experiment'' (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1917)
*''Bridget'' (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1918)
*''The Pagoda Tree'' (London: Cassell & Co., 1919)
*''Blue China'' (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1919)
*''The Chaperon'' (London: Cassell & Co., 1920)
*''The House of Rest'' (London: Cassell & Co., 1921)

Short story collections

*''To Let, etc.'' (London: Chatto and Windus, 1893)
*''Village Tales and Jungle Tragedies, etc.'' (London: Chatto and Windus, 1895)
** reprinted as ''Jungle Tales'' (London: Chatto and Windus, 1913)
*''In the Kingdom of Kerry and Other Stories'' (London: Chatto and Windus, 1896)
*''Jason and Other Stories'' (London: Chatto and Windus, 1899)
*''A State Secret and Other Stories'' (London: Methuen, 1901)
*''The Old Cantonment, with Other Stories of India and Elsewhere'' (London: Methuen & Co., 1905)
*''Odds and Ends'' (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1919)
* ''The Dread of Night. Supernatural Encounters from the British Raj. Stories by Bithia Mary Croker and Alice Perrin'' (India: Speaking Tiger, 2023)

Analysis

An in-depth and detailed study of her novels, with special reference to her depiction of India, has been carried out by Dr Shashidhar G. Vaidya, under the supervision of Dr B. S. Naikar, former professor and chairman, Department of Studies in English, at Karnatak University.

A discussion of the cultural context of Croker's fiction, together with close readings of several of her novels and stories, can be found in John Wilson Foster, ''Irish Novels 1890–1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction'' (Oxford, UK: OUP, 2008). Some present-day scholars have seen in Croker's work examples of a "conjoining of gender and colonialism".Anindyo Roy: ''Civility and Empire. Literature and Culture in British India, 1822–1922''
(Routledge: Abingdon, UK, 2005), p. 90 Retrieved 31 October 2015 Roy's example is Croker's ''Angel: A Sketch in Indian Ink'' (1901).

References

Further reading

* Helen C. Black
''Mrs. Croker''. In: ''Pen, Pencil, Baton and Mask. Biographical Sketches.''
1896, p. 83-92. Accessed 20 October 2024.

External links

*

Works by Bithia Mary Croker
a
Veranda Archive
*
*
* ''To Let'' (1906) onlin
Retrieved 30 October 2015


(Retrieved 30 October 2015)
* A portrait photograph of Croke
Retrieved 31 October 2015
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*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Croker, B M
1840s births
1920 deaths
British people in colonial India
19th-century Irish women writers
20th-century Irish women writers
Indian women short story writers
Indian women novelists
19th-century Indian novelists
20th-century Indian novelists
19th-century Indian short story writers
20th-century Indian short story writers