Excellent academic but well written work on the lives of women who went to India from Britain during the period of the Raj. Different chapters look at the various aspects of their lives, based on a wide variety of sources. The tone is sympathetic but not uncritical - above all, it aims at understanding. This is now one of the older books in the field but is still excellent. ( )

I'm not sure what would have garnered this book 5 stars from me. It was quite readable, the author attempted to write even-handedly about the "nose-in-the-air" superior British memsahibs and the "grab-life-with-both-hands" adventuresome types.

MacMillan covers the entire gamut of their experiences, both urban and planter cultures, and there was nothing I questioned as ringing less than true.

If you are interested in learning more than you learned about the life during the Raj from [The Secret Garden], this is an excellent source.

PS: Suffering Moses still exists in Srinagar, though the craftsmanship of its papiér mâché is of inferior quality. ( )

The title of this book says it all. In a nutshell MacMillan paints a portrait of British women during the 19th century in India under British rule. She covers all aspects of a woman's life during the Raj from arriving by the boatload to (for some) dying in the Mutiny and everything in between. What you will discover is that McMillan's work isn't overly scholarly. It is more of a commentary on the social, economic and cultural dynamics of a slice of history from the perspective of a wife, daughter, sister, mother... ( )

While there was a great deal of good information in this book about what life was like for English women in India during the Raj, the book seemed too sweeping in its themes and rarely offered details about individual women who spent time in the country. Names were given of many of those whose memoirs and diaries provided the book’s basic material, but the several entries by any single woman were so short and widely spaced that one had little chance to get a feel for their author's personal history. It was perplexing that quotations within a single paragraph might be dated as much as one hundred years apart, for it appears unlikely that conditions in India could have been that static. Well researched, with a fascinating bibliography, but not a compelling read. ( )

It's hard to work up any sympathy for women who had upwards of 10 servants. Women of the Raj is an account of the lives of British women who went out to live in India during the days of Empire. The main reason, of course, was to accompany a husband, or to find one. This world is foreign to us today: It's nearly impossible now to imagine a woman who would get rid of a servant because he (of course he was an Indian) grabbed her arm while saving her from a fatal snakebite.

Children were sent Home (always captialized) at the tender of age of seven for schooling and to escape the evil effects of being in India, and were seldom seen by their parents again.

It's easy, of course, to judge these women as prejudiced partners of predatory colonials, but life is rarely so simple. This is a book for those who want to understand what daily life was like in an alien environment, a place in which however much "authority" one might have, one is neither welcomed nor understood. This book is quite fascinating and recommended as background work for anyone interested in feminist histroy, the Victorian eras, or the Raj itself. Many primary sources are cited in the excellent bibliography. ( )