“Sensation” India

Florence Marryat was a prolific author, as well as being renowned for both her involvement with spiritualism and her parallel career as an actress. In 1854, she married Thomas Ross Church, an officer in the British Army, with whom she travelled through India for six years. On coming back to England, she began her successful writing career. She specialized in popular (and lucrative) sensation novels, but she also capitalized on her residence in India by penning a travel memoir: Gup. Sketches of Anglo-Indian Life and Character, eventually released as a volume in 1868. By engaging in a close reading of the text, this paper sets out to demonstrate that, in crafting her account, Marryat concocted an imaginary, “sensational” depiction of India and its people, to please and entertain her readership, while serving her own social and political agendas.