Bithia Mary Croker (née Sheppard, 28 May 1847 – 20 October 1920) was an Irish novelist most known for her works concerning life and society in British India.
Her younger brother William Harry Cope Sheppard went on to become president of the Dublin rugby union club Wanderers F. C.[3] Her father died in 1855 after a protracted illness,[4] when Bithia was eight years old.
[8] Her only child, Gertrude Eileen Celeste Croker, was born in Bangalore in December 1872 and baptized in Madras in January 1873.
Croker spent some time in the hill station of Wellington now in Tamil Nadu, where she wrote many of her works, having begun to do so as a distraction during the hot season.
After she had sent the original manuscript to an editor and hadn't heard back for many months, she thought it was lost, rewrote it from memory and eventually had it published anonymously in the UK.
[1] The book, according to a present-day account, "shows open sympathy with the male viewpoint and metes out punishing treatment to its spirited, horse-riding heroine, whose distrustful pride separates her from her devoted husband.
"[5] Croker's work has been praised in general for "a sensitive ear for speech, for idiom and the diction of different classes, which she reproduces in lively and entertaining dialogue."
Her 1905 story The Little Brass God, for example, involves a statue of Kali, described as a "goddess of destruction", who brings various misfortunes on the Anglo-Indians who possess it.
[11] It has been claimed that her 1917 novel The Road to Mandalay, set in Burma, was the uncredited basis for the 1926 American silent film of the same name directed by Tod Browning, of which only a 35 min version has been restored.
[1] The author and academic Douglas Sladen went so far as to call her, with her "valued friends" Perrin and Flora Annie Steel, "three who have long divided the Indian Empire with Rudyard Kipling as a realm of fiction.