SOURCE: "The Happy Years," in Novels of Empire, Columbia University Press, 1949, pp. 38-64.

In the following extract, Howe explores the depiction of British men and women in India in Victorian novels, focusing on the representation of women, younger sons, missionaries, and Anglo-Indians.

We should not believe, of course, that novels about India have always been peopled exclusively with psychoneurotics, white or brown. There were many happy years before the middle of the nineteenth century when one could read novels with Indian settings from the Minerva Press and Mudie's and still sleep quietly of nights. We may return to those days for a while and see how the Anglo-Indian stories, like so much other English colonial fiction, fitted into the well-established patterns of the English novel.

The novelists had thirty or forty "quiet" years of the earlier nineteenth century in which to do this, years in which scarcely anyone...