B. M. Croker

Croker was born in 1847 in Warrenpoint, County Down, Northern Ireland. 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. In 1871, she married John Stokes Croker, an officer in the Royal Scots Fusiliers and later the Royal Munster Fusiliers, in Rathangan, County Kildare, and they lived there for some time in Oakley House. 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. Her only child, Gertrude Eileen Celeste Croker, was born in Bangalore in December 1872 and baptized in Madras in January 1873. 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. 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. 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. 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==

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". ==References==