A Fan's Playground

Another nonfiction book consisting of the letters home of a 19th century white century woman who travels to a different country, listened to as a Librivox audiobook! This one is by accredited doctor Clara Swain, who travelled to India in the 1860’s as a missionary and stayed for 27 years.

This book is definitely even more colonialist than the one about New Zealand I listened to last year. The New Zealand one just has a few offhand mentions of the native population which means at least the reader doesn’t get descriptions of active terribleness on the part of the white people, just the knowledge that the writer is there as part of a Very Colonial Endeavour. But this one is all about the writer’s regular interactions with the local people as she tries to convert them to Christianity.

I mean, it was obvious going in that it was going to be terribly colonialist and probably pretty racist, the question was merely about degrees. It’s.....not as bad as it could be, which I know is still not saying a lot. Clara is definitely of the benevolent-paternalism school of racism, which is at least not as directly violent as some brands of racism. But it's still unfortunate, and gets rather bad sometimes. An example:

( cut for detailed description of a racist incident )

Overall, despite Clara’s issues, the book was an interesting one, though kind of tedious and repetitive at points since it covers 27 years' worth of relatively similar work and the letters are excerpted to exclude anything personal. It was neat to learn about the types of missionary work done in India at that time, especially since at a later era my great-grandparents were also missionaries in India, though in a different region.

And I was also made to think once again about the gendered social roles available to someone like Clara in her era. At one point in the book, Clara makes an offhand comment where she's clear that if she'd been born a boy she would have been an engineer. But in her gender and culture, one of the few ways a woman can have a respectable independent, ambitious, career-focused life is as a missionary. Engineer is right out. It's one of the things that's so interesting in reading about 19th century Western missionary women: wondering what else they might have done with their lives instead, if they'd had more options open to them. Clara seems to genuinely feel called to her mission work, and get real satisfaction out of it (....for better or worse), but she also knows that if she'd been a man she would not have been a missionary. But of course we only get one sentence on the topic because obviously we can't learn too much about Clara's personal feelings about things!

I rather wished in general to know more about what was going on in Clara’s personal life throughout the book, in fact. The extracts from the letters that comprise this book are all about Clara’s missionary work, and there’s just hints here and there of what else might be going on. For example: after 5 years in India Clara goes back to the USA for a home leave, stays for several years, then returns to India looking much more haggard and having clearly uncertain health. What happened during her time at home??

Well, I understand Clara's desire to make sure her published letters didn't include too many personal details since I would probably feel similarly if I were to publish something like that. But it still makes for a less engaging reading experience than Lady Barker's chatty letters from New Zealand.

( cut for....spoilers, I guess? )

So here's the problem with not writing up my thoughts immediately after finishing a book: I FORGET WHAT THEY ARE. So here, have some extremely abbreviated book thoughts. Sigh.

( Captive Prince book 1 )

( As Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution it Inspired, by Benson Bobrick )

( Mike & Psmith, and Psmith in the City, by P.G. Wodehouse )

( First Test, and Page, by Tamora Pierce )

( The Annotated Secret Garden (The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, the annotations by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina) )