edited with an introduction and notes by Melissa Edmundson Makala
“The volume is beautifully produced and bookended by a learned and perceptive literary Introduction to Perrin’s work by editor Melissa Edmunson Makala and by two interesting appendices depicting the cultural context of the British Raj as the historical frame of the author’s body of work. Highly recommended.” Mario Guslandi, The Short Review
Originally published in 1901, East of Suez was Alice Perrin’s first collection of short stories. Her fascinating and thought-provoking tales of Anglo-Indian life rival the best work of Kipling, and were hugely successful in their day. Perrin tells stories of illicit love and betrayal set against a beautifully-drawn backdrop of the mystical east, interweaving the supernatural with exquisite details of her characters’ lives. As the Times wrote in her obituary: “She wrote a simple, unforced style, and the reader feels keenly the heat, the dust, the moonrise, the night calls, and all the sights and sounds and smells of the unchanging East.”
Her use of ghosts as a form of social critique makes Perrin’s work both daring and distinctive. Although Perrin often denies her readers a happy ending, she always gives them a memorable story.
The stories are:
- Beynon, of the Irrigation Department
- The Tiger-Charm
- A Perverted Punishment
- An Eastern Echo
- A Man’s Theory
- The Summoning of Arnold
- In the Next Room
- The White Tiger
- Caulfield’s Crime
- The Fakir’s Island
- The Belief of Bhagwan, Bearer
- ‘In the Court of Conscience’
- Chunia, Ayah
- The Biscobra
This new edition, edited by Melissa Edmunson Makala, includes:
- Critical introduction
- Author biography
- Suggestions for further reading
- Explanatory notes
- Contextual material on representations of the British Raj
- Illustrations from The Illustrated London News and The Windsor Magazine
Melissa Makala specializes in nineteenth and early twentieth-century British literature and teaches at the University of South Carolina. She just completed a book on women’s writing and the supernatural, titled Avenging Angels: The Female Ghost Story in Nineteenth-Century Britain, and is currently working on a larger project involving the Anglo-Indian ghost stories of Bithia Mary Croker and Alice Perrin. Her essays have appeared in English Studies, English Language Notes, Persuasions, The North Carolina Literary Review, Notes and Queries, and The CEA Critic. She has essays forthcoming on the haunted house stories of Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant in Gothic Studies and on the Anglo-Indian ghost stories of Bithia Mary Croker and Alice Perrin in the collection, White Women and British India.