NOVELIST’S DEATH

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 72, Issue 91, 17 April 1929, Page 7

NOVELIST’S DEATH

MRS FLORA ANNIE STEEL I Australian Press Assn. ) LONDON, April 15. The death is reported of Airs Flora Annie Steel, novelist. (Mrs Steel, who was born at Harrow on April 2, 1847, spent more than 20 years in India. She was provincial inspectress of Government and aided schools in the Punjab, and for some years was a member of the Educational Committee. She published “Widc-a-Wake Stories” in 1884, and “Complete Indian Cook and Housekeepers” in 1887, but her first novel did not come out until 1893, and “On th c Face of the Waters.” which made her reputation, appeared in 1896. Since then she had written many books, two published last year being “Thc Bdilder” and the 4 Hie Curse of Eve.’’ A writer in the London Daily Telegraph stated recently that although Mrs Steel had no real education, being sacrificed to her brothers in the Victorian way, she helped to start female education in the Punjab and wrote several primers, which are still in use in India. When the first Indian girls’ secondary schools were established, Euclid was put on the curriculum. She objected, and ha7i hygiene and domestic matters substituted. * ‘But we have no primers on these subjects,” it was protested. Nothing daunted she volunteered to write them, went back to Oxford, studied there, and produced primers that earned medical approval. They were forwarded to a Government Department, but she never received a penny for them, although they must have been among her “best sellers.” Another of her amateur enterprises was doctoring Indians, mainly with “common scns e and rhubarb powder.’’ Medical friends lent her books, and she would deal with as many as 70 patients in a morning.)