The Fishing Fleet: Husband-Hunting in the Raj - Hardcover

De Courcy, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297863827 ISBN 13: 9780297863823

Verlag: W&N, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Please Read Notes: Brand New, International Softcover Edition, Printed in black and white pages, minor self wear on the cover or pages, Sale restriction may be printed on the book, but Book name, contents, and author are exactly same as Hardcover Edition. Fast delivery through DHL/FedEx express.

Über diesen Titel

Críticas

This book is highly evocative... De Courcy takes the reader through an enchanted world (THE GUARDIAN)

The Fishing Fleet is an entertaining, richly detailed account of a world that vanished overnight in 1947 with independence (Daisy Goodwin THE SUNDAY TIMES)

The Fishing Fleet is a fascinating and evocatively told history, which summons both the exoticism of India under British rule and the lives and characters of the women who risked all for a husband (FINANCIAL TIMES)

lively and well-researched (THE SPECTATOR)

Anne de Courcy combines the perseverance of a social historian with the panache of a novelist in her tales from the Raj... she vividly and cleverly evokes the ironclad social culture of rank and race, the oppression of expatriate life once a husband was bagged and boredom set in (Iain Finlayson THE TIMES)

A seasoned social historian, Anne de Courcy brilliantly evokes the era, often by allowing her heroines to do the talking. We hear vivid contemporary descriptions of everything from tiger hunts and tea dances to the agonies of prickly heat... the women who married into the Raj were true adventurers. de Courcy's book restores their proper reputation: as brave, sometimes batty, irredeemably British heroines (DAILY MAIL)

De Courcy tells their story with perspicacity and aplomb (THE FIELD)

Through heat, dust, lust and wedlock, de Courcy's memsahibs step a lively dance (SAGA MAGAZINE)

Anne de Courcy's sparkling book is an unalloyed delight (THE LADY)

This is a fascinating account of the rules, roles and relations of the British Raj (THE DAILY TELEGRAPH)

Reseña del editor

The untold stories of the young women who went out to India during the Raj in search of husbands.

From the late 19th century, when the Raj was at its height, many of Britain's best and brightest young men went out to India to work as administrators, soldiers and businessmen. With the advent of steam travel and the opening of the Suez Canal, countless young women, suffering at the lack of eligible men in Britain, followed in their wake. This amorphous band was composed of daughters returning after their English education, girls invited to stay with married sisters or friends, and yet others whose declared or undeclared goal was simply to find a husband. They were known as the Fishing Fleet, and this book is their story, hitherto untold.

For these young women, often away from home for the first time, one thing they could be sure of was a rollicking good time. By the early twentieth century, a hectic social scene was in place, with dances, parties, amateur theatricals, picnics, tennis tournaments, cinemas, gymkhanas with perhaps a tiger shoot and a glittering dinner at a raja's palace thrown in. And, with men outnumbering women by roughly four to one, romances were conducted at alarming speed and marriages were frequent. But after the honeymoon life often changed dramatically: whisked off to a remote outpost with few other Europeans for company and where constant vigilance was required to guard against disease, they found it a far cry from the social whirlwind of their first arrival.

Anne de Courcy's sparkling narrative is enriched by a wealth of first-hand sources - unpublished memoirs, letters, diaries and photographs - which bring this forgotten era vividly to life.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: W&N
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0297863827
• ISBN 13: 9780297863823
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352