Flora Annie Steel
Punjab's English Folklorist

She was not Kipling, but she was the closest female equivalent to it. Flora Annie Steel was an English woman, and English Folklorist, who married Henry Steel, a man in the Indian Civil Service and moved to India with him.

For 22 years, she lived in Punjab, India (known today as Pakistan), and there she found herself intensely interested in women's rights.

Flora Annie Steel was born the youngest daughter in a very large upper-middle-class Scottish family; her parents were unhappy together, and she was largely forgotten. Because her parents would not hire a governess, she was largely uneducated, and depended on her family's large library to support her voracious thirst for knowledge.

This proved to be to her advantage, as she became a lifelong learner and student of human nature. Mostly to get away from home and live freely, she married a man she did not love; within a day of their wedding, they set sail for India.

She cut her hair, donned pants, and learned to speak Punjabi in order to communicate with the Indian women. She also discovered a love for spending time with the poor and working poor. Appalled at the treatment of the women and at their lack of basic hygienic knowledge, she took it upon herself to set up a girl's school to teach womanly basics to Indian girls.

Eventually, this self-educated woman became the first female Inspectress of Schools in India, and she worked hard to help women here learn embroidery, then a trade dominated by men.

Flora learned one thing very fast: the women of India told stories just as the women of her Scottish homeland did. Though she started writing pamphlets on Indian handicrafts, she soon began writing down the folk tales told by Punjabi women.

These stories were eventually published in England as From the Five Rivers and Tales of the Punjab. In 1889, the Steels moved back to England, where Flora was reunited with her family and the daughter she'd borne in India and brought home to be educated in Scotland.

Her books gained instant popularity, and she was hailed as a female version of Rudyard Kipling as she turned out novel after novel about her adventures in India.

For the rest of her life, she travelled, usually opting to travel second or third class to interact with the ordinary people she loved.

In addition to her tales of India, Flora wrote the classic English Fairy Tales , including the well-known and widely-read fairy stories The Three Bears, Tattercoats, Jack the Giant Killer, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Tom Thumb.

While all these stories had been written down before in Britain, no one had compiled them in a version so open to being read out loud as Flora Steel had.

Flora Annie Steel continued to travel widely, generally leaving her ill husband behind, until her death in 1929.

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