Maya Jasanoff writes:

Hartly House, Calcutta, published anonymously in the spring of 1789, takes the form of a series of letters written by a young Englishwoman, Sophia Goldborne, to her friend Arabella back home. Sophia has gone to Bengal to accompany her father, an East India Company ship’s captain, and spends a year or so revelling in Calcutta society, as the guest of family friends, Mr and Mrs Hartly. Read in one light, the book belongs to the classic 18th-century genre – transposed to the East – of sentimental epistolary novels in which the young heroine overcomes her naive prejudices to land an eminently marriageable man. From another perspective, the book serves as one of a small cluster of published sources on Anglo-Indian life in this rapidly developing outpost. Sophia’s letters provide such detailed descriptions of Calcutta and its residents that they were widely assumed to be eyewitness reports. It would be hard to claim Hartly House, Calcutta as a work of high literary merit, but its Indian setting and blend of reportage with storytelling make it tremendously intriguing. This new edition, introduced and heavily annotated by Michael Franklin, should be welcomed by both literary scholars and historians.

(LRB 20 March 2008)

Oxford | paperback 222 pp. |ISBN: 9780195685640