Up the Country: Letters Written to her Sister from the Upper Provinces of India

Raised in a politically-active household, Emily Eden’s childhood prepared her well for her role as companion to her brother, the Governor-General of India. Outwardly all that a middle-class spinster should be, Eden never permitted diplomacy to dilute her letters home. Published in 1866, the letters provoked sympathy among women who had similarly endured dusty bonnets to accompany fathers and husbands to distant outposts of the British Empire. As one reviewer noted, this book is ‘addressed primarily to a public consisting of wives, sisters, or daughters of possible Governors-General, and is sure therefore of general popularity’. There is still plenty to amuse modern audiences. Volume 2 conveys the growing anxiety surrounding the Anglo-Afghan war, stirring and sympathetic accounts of poverty, and the author’s eagerness to return to her much-loved Kensington. Eden’s descriptive passages and personal reflections are all narrated with her signature sensitivity and wit.