'THE WORLD IS WELCOME TO STEEL (!)': PUBLISHING TRANSACTIONS IN THE LITERARY CAREER OF FLORA ANNIE STEEL

[...]the publisher is like a market woman, with a basket of eggs to sell. Steel's prodigious body of publishing correspondence, particularly with publisher Frederick Macmillan and William Morris Colles, her literary agent from 1893 to the late 1910s, provides a valuable record of these authoria...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPublishing history Vol. 83; pp. 55 - 6
Main Author Goodwin, Gráinne
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge Chadwyck-Healey Ltd 01.01.2020
Subjects
Careers
Correspondence
Cultural identity
Folklore
Gender
Literary translation
Negotiation
Occupations
Plot (Narrative)
Power
Publishing industry
Punjabi language
Reputations
Short stories
Women
Writers
United Kingdom > UK
India
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Summary:[...]the publisher is like a market woman, with a basket of eggs to sell. Steel's prodigious body of publishing correspondence, particularly with publisher Frederick Macmillan and William Morris Colles, her literary agent from 1893 to the late 1910s, provides a valuable record of these authorial negotiations and power dynamics.4 It offers an insight into Steel's publishing affairs, where the issues of professional identity, anxieties over cultural and capital gain, and the relational nature of the literary market are all patent. Steel's support of her husband's peripatetic career as a Deputy Commissioner in the Punjab, her reputation as a renowned domestic manager and hostess, her position as a pioneering inspector of female schools and her keen participation in and sometimes criticism of Anglo-Indian life, warranted her some acclaim in her own lifetime and continue to attract scholarly interest in this 'unconventional memsahib'.13 Steel's colonial encounter in India furnished her with knowledge and experience, images and ideas, which she translated into literary productions and her authorial career was generally grounded in the Indian milieu with which she was familiar. Whilst in India Steel had brought out the domestic manual The Complete Indian Cook and Housekeeper (1888) with Grace Gardiner and Wide Awake Stories (1884), a collection of Punjabi folktales, but this was hardly a prodigious body of work with which to unleash her offensive on the British marketplace.14 Despite the cultural capital accrued during her decades in British India and her acquaintance with a number of senior colonial officials such as Sir Charles Aitchison and Baden Henry Powell, Steel had neither social nor familial contacts that might assist her to break into specifically literary circles and in choosing to settle in Aberdeenshire on her return she was far removed from London's publishing scene.
ISSN:0309-2445