Flora Annie Steel

She was a writer who lived in British India for 22 years and was born on April 2, 1847, and died on April 12, 1929. She was known for writing books that took place in or had something to do with the Indian subcontinent. In her 1896 book On the Face of the Waters, she writes about events in the Indian Mutiny. Flora Annie Webster was born at Sudbury Priory in Sudbury, Middlesex. She was George Webster's sixth child. The woman who raised her, Isabella MacCallum, was a rich woman. Henry William Steel was in the Indian Civil Service when she married him in 1867. They lived in India until 1889, mostly in the Punjab, which is where most of her books are set. She became very interested in the lives of local Indians and started to ask the Indian government to make changes to the way schools work. As an adult, Mrs. Steel worked as an Inspector of Government and Aided Schools in the Punjab. She also helped promote Indian arts and crafts with Rudyard Kipling's father, John Lockwood Kipling. At times when her husband was sick, Flora Annie Steel took on some of his duties. She passed away in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, on April 12, 1929, at the home of her daughter. Biographers Violet Powell and Daya Patwardhan have written about her.