In the last months of her life, Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) returned to one of her earliest and most popular works, The Missionary: An Indian Tale (1811), and devoted time between attacks of severe bronchitis to revising it. The revised novel was published in 1859 under the name of Luxima, the Prophetess: A Tale of India. According to the unattributed preface to Luxima it was “greatly altered,” receiving the final touches only a few days before Owenson's death on April 16, 1859 (Luxima iii; preface).Footnote ¹ The revisions are extensive. Most prominent of all is the excision of tracts of particularly purple prose, and the reining in of some of the elements that mark The Missionary as a novel of sensibility.Footnote ² These changes were considered prudent even in 1811: an otherwise complimentary notice on The Missionary in Critical Review urges the author to “divest her style of its luxuriant redundancies, and to write in a more simple and natural manner.” Another reviewer styled the novel “outrageously romantic” (qtd. in Missionary 298). Yet despite recent critical consensus that Owenson's 1859 revisions were for the most part cosmetic, it seems unlikely that in her death throes Owenson spent sleepless nights worrying about lukewarm reviews of a novel she had written over forty years earlier.

I wish to take the author of the preface to Luxima at his or her word, and agree not only that the novel was “greatly altered,” but that the novel prefers “no ordinary claims to public attention . . . the more particularly on account of the recent melancholy occurrences which have distracted a country with which we have so long had such extensive commercial relations” (Luxima iv, preface). Not only was the publication of Luxima timely, but the entire impetus for the revision appears to have been the Indian rebellion of 1857–58, just as the Vellore mutiny of 1806–07 loomed on the political horizon of The Missionary in 1811. By focusing on a small number of representative changes from 1811 to 1859 I hope to resituate Luxima in its mid-century context and prove that the importance of The Missionary and Luxima as separate novels cannot be underestimated. Luxima is not merely a response to a change in literary fashions; it is the result of a recognition by Owenson that the novel of sensibility cannot comprehend the new contours of the popular understanding of the British presence in India. The revised novel belongs at the head of a long list of so-called “Mutiny novels,” one of the first to be published after Charles Dickens's and Wilkie Collins's short novel, “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners.” Owenson simultaneously distances her novel from the vague cosmopolitanism of romantic orientalism, and from the violent, triumphalist imperialism of the period after the 1857–58 rebellion. Luxima thus stands at the cusp of two traditions of fictional representations of empire that are fractured by the very public trauma of the rebellion.

The novel, in both its 1811 and 1859 iterations, has been the subject of relatively little interest, living as it does in the shadow of Owenson's more widely read 1806 novel, The Wild Irish Girl.Footnote ³ Those who have written about The Missionary have situated it at the very crux of debates about the British Empire in the early nineteenth century. Owenson's self-conscious appeal in her copious footnotes to the authority of Anglo-French Orientalism has led to accusations that The Missionary is a derivative tale, mimicking if not even exceeding the excesses of orientalist scholarship and colonial policy (Ahmed; Chakravarty 79–91; Leask 101–02). The Owenson whose Wild Irish Girl was so critical of imperial policy in Ireland finds a more sympathetic reception in other quarters, where The Missionary is seen as questioning, if not skeptical of, imperial power and missionary activity (Lennon 147–55; Viswanathan 27–31; Rajan 128–38). While these readings offer a comprehensive intellectual and cultural framework for the thematics of the novel – failed conversion, cross-cultural romance, the eroticized/feminized East – its immediate historical context has received less attention. The Vellore mutiny of 1806–07 does not come to particular prominence in The Missionary, but is thrown into sharp relief with the publication of Luxima in the aftermath of the 1857–58 rebellion. The fact that Luxima is largely unread means that both the revisions to the novel and the violent contexts of the writing and re-writing remain submerged in treatments of The Missionary.

The only reader to take substantial notice of the revisions' significance to the novel in 1859 is Gauri Viswanathan, who writes that the new title, Luxima, the Prophetess, expresses the increasing irrelevance of missionaries in the charged political atmosphere at the time of the 1857–58 rebellion (27). Julia Wright's introduction to her 2002 edition of The Missionary notes a number of changes, and argues that Owenson revises the text to better fit the Victorian taste for the realist novel over the novel of sensibility. She also remarks on the significance of the increased attention to Indian religions, and on the fact that in the revised novel the missionary is partially educated in Portugal by a Franciscan convert from Hinduism. Wright's overall judgment, however, is that “the text of Luxima is little different from The Missionary” (53–56). For the most part, the immediate political context of Owenson's rewriting in 1857–58 is ignored. This appears to be primarily a function not of a refusal to read the novel historically, but of a conviction that the subtle differences between The Missionary and Luxima are so few and immaterial as to make the 1859 edition negligible. Chakravarty, for example, dismisses Luxima as “identical in all but the title” to The Missionary, and reads Owenson's novel not as a commentary on the 1850s rebellion itself, but as a precursor by fifty years or so to “Mutiny novels.” He writes that that the subtitle of Luxima, the Prophetess: A Tale of India is analeptic – looking back to the subtitle of The Missionary: An Indian Tale – and that it “suggests the possibility of applying the old aetiology to the latest revolt” (88–89). What he overlooks, however, is the fact that the subtitle is not identical in 1859. The somewhat presumptuous ascription of an Indian provenance to the story – “An Indian Tale” – is rejected in favor of a more moderate description of the tale as “of India.” This in itself should lead the reader to question the possibilities of affective connection to India so prominent in the title and the prose of The Missionary.

That Luxima and The Missionary cannot simply be read as identical novels should be clear from a brief textual comparison. Taking Julia Wright's edition of The Missionary as the basis of a broad quantitative analysis, we can see that about eighteen out of one hundred and ninety pages were cut for the revised edition, an almost ten-percent reduction in length. Approximately one page of text was added. At the smallest level, changes in the text include updates of proper names and terms borrowed from Indian languages. Given the inconsistencies between the three volumes of the first edition, and the numerous errors, it is rather difficult to make any sustained argument about the corrections from 1811 to 1859 (Missionary 65). There are other minor changes besides corrections that are not easily quantifiable, but that appear at regular intervals in the novel. Take, for example, the first sentence. In 1811 it reads, “In the beginning of the seventeenth century, Portugal, bereft of her natural sovereigns, had become an object of contention, to various powers in Europe” (71, ch. 1). The 1859 edition reads, “In the early part of the seventeenth century, Portugal, bereft of her natural sovereigns, had become an object of contention to various powers in Europe” (Luxima 1; ch. 1). These minor changes for the most part do not have a significant impact on the text, though I have concentrated below on some small revisions that do indeed affect the tone. However, these changes are revealing, as they indicate close attention on Owenson's part to particular points in the novel during the revision process. Excisions of blocks of text occur throughout, though with a noticeable reduction in the final two chapters, which feature a smaller but significant number of changes. Speaking in broad terms, these excisions – which range from a couple of lines to two and a half pages – are of bloated prose. Expressions of the missionary and Luxima's exceeding virtue, the missionary's warm feelings for Luxima, and their uncontrollable passions are shortened in many places, particularly in the middle chapters. These are indeed stylistic changes, but their effects go beyond style to the very heart of the revised novel and its relationship to a rebellious India. Finally, there is one more chapter in 1859 than in 1811 – the missionary's journey to India and his arrival are broken into two chapters. This may look like a scattered array of minor stylistic changes, but taken together these edits indicate a major attempt to revise every part of the novel, and with significant effect.

I

The novel is set in the middle of the seventeenth century, when a Franciscan missionary, Hilarion, sets out from Portugal, then under the control of the Spanish, for Goa and ultimately Kashmir. He meets on his missionary travels a beautiful and renowned widowed Kashmiri priestess, Luxima. Encouraged by a pundit who tells him that it will effect the conversion of millions, he attempts to convert her. She resists his attempts at conversion, but falls in love with him. Mindful of his vows, he struggles with his feelings towards her, but cannot help falling in love. His zeal for conversion fades, as does his strict adherence to religious abstractions. Upon being discovered in communion with him, Luxima is exiled and excommunicated by her guru grandfather, and becomes an out-caste. She and the missionary embark on a perilous journey back to Goa, where he intends to place her in a convent, beyond temptation to either of them. On this journey Hilarion finally succeeds in baptizing Luxima, though his triumph is equivocal: she converts out of love for him and brings no converts with her, being at that point exiled from her co-religionists. They meet up with a caravan, which includes Jesuit and Dominican Spanish officers of the Inquisition, who find the couple in a compromising position and arrest Hilarion. When the caravan reaches Goa, Hilarion is tried for a heretic and condemned to be burned at the stake. On the day of the execution the delirious Luxima conflates the fire and the funeral pyre of her late husband, and throws herself onto it in an effort to commit Sati. She is rescued by the missionary, but wounded by one of the Spanish soldiers. Seeing their priestess thus injured, and emboldened by the news of Portugal's recent independence from Spain, the crowd of Hindu onlookers is roused to rebellion. In the mêlée that results, Hilarion and Luxima slip away. In a conclusion that marks the simultaneous failure of the romance plot and the conversion plot, Luxima dies shortly afterwards, an apostate, and the disillusioned missionary retires to the cave in Kashmir where he first met her.

The ending is, without question, a commentary on colonial rebellion, a reading justified by Owenson's footnote to the following passage:

The footnote that follows stands out in part because unlike most of the other footnotes it does not turn to orientalist scholarship to gloss terms in the text. Rather, it references events loosely contemporaneous with the novel's publication. It reads:

Owenson's awkward repetition of the qualifier, “supposed,” does not merely denote her distance from these events; it tars both the officers of the East India Company and the “natives” who mutinied with the same brush of ignorance and supposition. It also foregrounds the difficulty of establishing motives for rebellions. John Kaye, the historian of the 1857–58 rebellion, is as leery as Owenson of the common accounts of the causes of the 1806–07 Vellore Mutiny, turning rather to political and administrative issues than to questions of bigotry and conversion. However, like Owenson, he also cites those popular accounts. Many blamed the mutiny on the introduction of new uniform regulations for sepoys, which would make soldiers indistinguishable by caste or religion (218). Other accounts in common currency had it that newly-produced salt was sprinkled with the blood of cows and pigs, and then sent “to be sold throughout the country for the pollution and the desecration of Mahomedans and Hindus, that all might be brought to one caste and to one religion like the English” (248). Fifty years later, in 1857, a famous incident that allegedly sparked the mutiny already brewing in the Bengal regiments was practically the same: the new Enfield rifle required that the sepoys bite off the top of the cartridge to use it, and a widespread belief held that the lubricant in the cartridge was made of a mixture of beef and pork fat (489–90). These explanations, rooted in sacrilege, form only part of the complex of possible causes for the 1806–07 and 1857–58 disturbances. They are, however, most pertinent in the case of Owenson's novel, in which issues of conversion and coercion focus on the rebellion of the Indians at the scene of the auto-da-fé. Though Ranajit Guha may be vulnerable to accusations of resistance to the very real effects of religious belief, his conclusion to a passage on the analogies between the Vellore mutiny and the rebellion of 1857–58 points to the complex chain of signifiers in such rebellions as Owenson represents:

Given the connections between the two rebellions, one would expect Owenson to take the opportunity of the footnote about Vellore to situate her revised novel in the context of the 1857–58 events. Siraj Ahmed notes that rather than the action at Vellore glossing the novel, as its position in a footnote suggests, the novel in fact glosses the action at Vellore (par. 19). If Owenson really was thinking about the later rebellion as she updated the novel, this would be the place to mark those concerns, indicating that Luxima glosses Delhi, Lucknow, and Kanpur in the way that The Missionary glossed Vellore, Nandidrug, and Bangalore. There is, however, practically no change in 1859, except to the spelling of “Nundydrag” and “Benglore,” which become “Nundydroog” and “Bangalore” (Luxima 292–93; ch. 17). Owenson did not overlook the footnote; she corrected it. This does not mean that Owenson rejected the possibility that her novel could gloss the events of 1857–58; on the contrary, the decision not to change the footnote strengthens the novel's claim to be historical fiction that comments on the present. In 1859, however, even the first novel's moment of publication in 1811 provides a striking distance from which to observe the events of the present day. By leaving the footnote largely unchanged, Owenson ensures that the 1857–58 rebellion is doubly prefigured and doubly inscribed (as Chakravarty points out) by the fictional rebellion at the novel's climax, and by the Vellore mutiny (88). In a sense, a double allegory is now submerged in the plot. The complex chain of signifiers that subtends the novel becomes even longer and more unwieldy. It stretches geographically from Ireland to India via Britain and the Iberian peninsula; its thematic sweep takes in colonialism, religious bigotry, violence, conversion, and alleged Hindu lassitude and pliability; and it covers the period from the fictional events of the 1650s, via the historical events of 1806, on to the present time of the novel's revision.

This footnote provides a convenient beginning for a discussion of the novel in the context of mutiny and rebellion – it is, after all, the only place where we hear Owenson's voice commenting on the political circumstances. But the figurative language throughout the novel is rich with suggestions of oppression, conversion, revolt, conflagration, and revenge, and even minute changes to this language have dramatic effects on the narrative. The most spectacular set-piece of the novel – the scene of now-disgraced missionary Hilarion's impending death by burning at the stake – is a focal point for the entire tonal shift from 1811 to 1859. From Adam in the opening chapters, who finds his Eve in Luxima and is then banished from the Garden of Eden, Hilarion is transformed into a Christ figure.Footnote ⁴ He is condemned in the public square, along with two Hindu converts who have relapsed, also a crime punishable by burning at the stake. As he waits by the already-burning pyre, a delirious Luxima arrives, “a form scarcely human, darting with the velocity of lightning” (Missionary 248, ch. 17). She runs to the pyre and stands briefly before it. In the second before she throws herself onto the flames, Hindus in the audience notice “the sacred impress of Brahma, marked on the brow of his consecrated offspring, and [behold] the fancied herald of the tenth Avatar.” The Christians in the crowd, however, see the cross on her breast and fancy that her appearance is a miracle, “wrought for the salvation of a persecuted martyr,” Hilarion. Hilarion himself sees her as simultaneously “Pagan priestess” and “Christian Neophyte.” Her eyes are raised to heaven as she murmurs “the Gayatra, pronounced by the Indian women before their voluntary immolation.” Catching a glimpse of the missionary through the flames, she cries, “My Beloved, I come! – Brahma receive and eternally unite our spirits!” (249, ch. 17). Thanks to the constant displacement and replacement of signifiers throughout the text, the plural possessive pronoun here is deeply ambiguous. Does “our” mean Brahma and Luxima's spirits? Luxima and the husband upon whose pyre she had wanted to immolate herself as a young girl? Or Luxima and Hilarion? The pagan priestess and Christian neophyte simultaneously represented by the body of Luxima refuse to untangle themselves even at this, her attempted suicide, and most assertive moment in the novel.

In Luxima the Prophetess in 1859 she no longer cries “My Beloved, I come,” merely “Brahma receive and eternally unite our spirits!” (Luxima 307; ch. 18). No longer is there such a yawning ambiguity, but the ambiguity that remains does not resolve itself in favor of Hilarion. In fact, the missionary is barely recognized. Luxima throws herself on the pyre, reciting the “Gayatra” in memory of an already-dead husband and calling to Brahma, not to the missionary or his God. Whereas in The Missionary there was at least a possibility that her thoughts were of Hilarion, in Luxima her relapse to her previous existence is complete. This revision goes to the heart of the 1859 changes. The outbreak of rebellion that follows this incident is in 1811 potentially in sympathy with Hilarion, whose missionary calling has a very different valence in the 1811 and 1859 versions of Owenson's novel. In 1811 the debate over missionary activity in India was centered on the deeply-controversial question of whether to sanction missions in India, an issue which became a focal point for the larger Orientalist/Anglicist debate over the future character of the British presence in India. In one early victory for the “civilizing” argument of the Anglicists, the renewal of the East India Company's charter in 1813 allowed missionary activity. Owenson was no reflex Anglicist, but The Missionary is at least not antithetical to the idea of missionary activity.Footnote ⁵ If the desired effects of the changes in the company's charter were conversion, civilization, and pacification, the 1857–58 rebellion made manifest the failure to achieve those aims. The novel of sensibility, the success of which lies in a positive affective relation with the reader, can no longer function effectively, given the introduction of horror, despair, disgust, and hatred – so vividly painted in the firsthand accounts of the rebellion that began to emerge in early 1858 – into the emotional vocabulary of British-Indian relations.

Owenson's 1811 novel is already ambivalent about the goals and the efficacy of the civilizing mission. Hilarion fails to convert Luxima, and fails to prevent her death; he merely defers or displaces it. His intervention into the Sati follows precisely Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's formulation of the self-reinforcing nature of abolitionism:

Leaving aside the difficulties of reading suicide as a moment of self-expression – of a widow carving out for herself through Sati the space of an exception, as Spivak would have it – Hilarion's intervention can indeed be read as a moment of imperialist object-constitution, robbing Luxima of the potential to claim herself as exceptional, or as having an existence outside of her own gendering and race-ing by Hilarion and others. Perversely, it is the Spanish soldier who stabs Luxima who gives her the distinction of choosing at least the hour and mode of her death – he delivers the fatal blow, thwarting Hilarion's rescue efforts. There is a latent skepticism towards the possibility of intervention into Hindu customs in the Sati scene even in 1811, but in 1859 the inefficacy of Hilarion's mission – and, by one of those extensions so common in the novel, the Anglicizing mission in general – and his marginalization is no longer merely hinted at; rather, it has become the plot of the novel.Footnote ⁶

Even the editing of purple prose points to political developments. The removal of long passages in which both the missionary and Luxima, though more the missionary, ponder the nature, the beauty, and the impossibility of their love, radically changes the character of their relationship. At a point at which Hilarion is forced to be apart from Luxima during their developing relationship, for example, in 1811 we are told that “all is hopeless, cold, and gloomy” (Missionary 133, ch. 8). In 1859 Hilarion is instead occupied with writing a biography of Francis Xavier, and his decision to preach to others besides Luxima is not motivated by feelings of hopelessness and despair but by the necessity of waiting for books to arrive from Lahore (Luxima 114; ch. 9). A short time later, he decides to fast for a week and refrain from seeing Luxima during that time. In 1811 her image grows stronger daily, “disputing with Heaven his nightly vigil and daily meditation” (Missionary 146, ch. 9). Eventually Hilarion gives up his privations, seeking Luxima out in desperation, shuddering and trembling when he sees her. In 1859 his thoughts are also occupied by her, but he lasts the full seven days. These kinds of changes abound, and are far too numerous to mention individually, or even to quantify. The changes may appear to be mere stylistic reconfigurations to fit a taste for novels of quite a different kind by mid-century, but each one is part of a careful re-structuring of the narrative. The nationalist tale's possibility of romantic love as inter-cultural reconciliation is already in question by 1811, as Katie Trumpener argues (146), but Owenson's revisions undermine it more thoroughly, if they do not foreclose it entirely. The romance between Hilarion and Luxima remains but is more closely associated with a desire for a convert and the failure of that mission, not with desire itself. Another more widespread rebellion has intervened, and it no longer seems appropriate that Luxima cry “My Beloved, I come!” as she leaps to what she supposes to be her death.

In the climactic auto-da-fé scene Owenson acts out the drama of European colonization on the stage of religious persecution. Although Luxima is determined to kill herself, the missionary will not allow her immolation in the fire. To save this symbol of both Hindu virtue and Christian conversion he reaches into the fire and pulls her out. The Spanish soldiers move in to seize Hilarion and Luxima, and “for a moment, the timid multitude [are] still as the pause of a brooding storm.” A soldier aims a dagger at Hilarion, but instead pierces Luxima's breast. “Brahma!” she cries, and her cry is “re-echoed on every side,” becoming a rallying call for revolt (Missionary 249, ch. 17). The execution, funeral, and suicide pyre become the conflagration of revolt, as the Indians in the crowd set the scene alight with fire and rebellion. The brief pause in the action – the “pause of a brooding storm” – invites the reader/audience to close the gap between what went before and what will inevitably come after. And indeed the reader has the tools to do just this. This “brooding storm” has appeared before in the novel, in the footnoted quote with which I opened this discussion, and it is a clear signal of impending anti-colonial revolt.

The “brooding storm” does not, however, derive its power in the novel from the common metaphor alone; the reader has been prepared for the repeated metaphor by the plot. Hilarion and Luxima are caught in a violent storm during their escape from Kashmir, a journey of temptations and tests to rival, or echo, Jesus's forty days in the desert. The storm is one of several moments in which the newly-baptized proselyte becomes the priestess once more, her terror leading her to turn anew to the religion she knows best and from which she draws the most comfort. Her mind, we are told, “adds the energy of repentance to the zeal of returning faith” (Missionary 218, ch. 14). In the teeth of the storm in the 1811 novel Hilarion stands near Luxima to “shield and protect her” as he will do again in the execution scene, and Owenson describes this action in unambiguously heroic terms:

In 1859 the encomium to the missionary is cut entirely, leaving us to the “breathless calm, scarcely less awful,” which succeeds to the storm's violence (Luxima 250–51; ch. 15). The “low and sullen murmurs of the elements” explodes into the “horror” and “terror” of the storm, giving the reader a foretaste of where the discontented murmurs of the Indians at the novel's climax will lead (Luxima 249, ch. 15). The aftermath of the rebellion is also “scarcely less awful” – there is general slaughter of the Indian population. By 1859 the missionary is neither fearless nor majestic in the face of the first storm he encounters, so when the pause opens up in the action of the auto-da-fé the reader may now close it not with confidence that Hilarion will reprise his heroic stance, but with the spectacle of unchecked conversion. In the face of this storm, Luxima will revert to Hinduism, and Hilarion will not oppose her apostasy. The space of the pause, so pregnant with the promise of heroism in 1811 (even if that promise is ultimately dashed by the end of the novel) is fraught with uncertainty in 1859.

Once the action resumes the crowd rushes forward and sets the scene for a conflagration: “Their religious enthusiasm kindling their human passions, their rage became at once inflamed and sanctified by their superstitious zeal” (Missionary 250, ch. 17). Again the reader is reminded of the scene of Hilarion and Luxima's escape from her father in Kashmir, for just before the trial by storm was a trial by fire. That fire, which sprang up suddenly and separated Hilarion from Luxima, was caused by bamboo,

The rebellious conflagration at the climax of the novel is, as in the case of the storm, a working out of the theme of conflagration first introduced in this section. If we know that the missionary's faith wavered in the face of the fire on the mountain, we can deduce that he will act similarly in Goa. Owenson offers little indication of Hilarion's thoughts during his escape from execution, and so we are left to construe them from his previous encounter with the prospect of a fiery death. On the mountain he accused “the Eternal Judge, who, in making the object of his error the cause of his retribution, had not proportioned his punishment to his crime” (Missionary 211, ch. 13) just as the Inquisition did not do later. Indeed, in the aftermath of the conflagration in Goa Hilarion turns from his mission, and possibly his faith, and returns to Kashmir, ignoring orders from Rome and from Luxima to preach.

The careful preparation for the metaphors of revolt in the climactic scene not only establishes Hilarion's questionable credentials as a savior and Luxima's propensity to apostasy. It also predetermines the character of the revolt, which is driven by awesome, natural, irrational forces.Footnote ⁷ All it takes is a sudden wind from the south – or the appearance of Luxima – to ignite the flame of rebellion, which spreads quickly and wildly among previously-quiescent Hindus:

As with so many other aspects of the climax, this scene too recapitulates the scene in which Hilarion is first arrested. Luxima throws herself at him, and those around them seize the officers of the Inquisition, threatening to kill them until Hilarion forbids it. The narrator tells us at this point that the “passions of a multitude know no precise limit” (Missionary 235, ch. 15). The increased marginalization and inefficacy of the missionary in the 1859 novel heightens the terror of the crowd scene, and effectively removes the only barrier between the rage of the Indians and the ruthless, murderous Spanish soldiers. This rebellion is potentially more threatening, bloody, and violent than its counterpart in The Missionary, presaging a far more violent literature of revolt that emerged in the decades after the 1857–58 rebellion.

II

John Kaye began hisHistory of the Indian Mutiny just as Sydney Owenson was preparing Luxima for publication. The majority of the first volume of his history is given over to an account of the management and mismanagement of India by East India Company officials in the century since the Battle of Plassey. In attempting to describe the causes of the Vellore Mutiny Kaye is scathingly critical of Company rule, a position that was not unfashionable at the time he was writing. He does, however, recognize that his own scholarship suffers from the same lack of knowledge that hampered the Company in 1806: he has no access to the thought processes of what he calls the “occult heart of native society” (245). He implies that this is not a personal failure in his account but a failure of the discipline of history, which relies on official accounts of events that simply cannot be described in what Guha calls the “prose of counter-insurgency,” with all its faults, lacunae, and rhetorical bluster (“Prose”). Perhaps the greatest example of this is George Trevelyan's Cawnpore (1865), which “spun out of very flimsy material a horror story which surpasses anything in cold cruelty” (S.N. Sen, qtd. in Brantlinger 202). A review of Luxima in Literary Gazette implies that Owenson has overcome those difficulties, offering a description of the “character, religion, and prejudices of the Hindoo” (qtd. in Missionary 312). This is not, of course, a mark of a clear difference between the novel and history, for a brief glance at Owenson's footnotes will tell us that she relied heavily on historical and orientalist scholarship for her sketch of “the Hindoo.” The reviewer, however, for all his or her arrogance in assuming that the rebellion was entirely about the prejudices of the ruled subjects, does offer us a way to think of Owenson's novel as standing outside of and against the dry account of the historian. To put it another way, Owenson can both mine orientalist and historical scholarship and offer a critical perspective on it. Divergence between the historical record and novels that make use of it is particularly important in the context of the rather loosely-defined genre of the “Mutiny novel.”

Gautam Chakravarty, who has undertaken the most comprehensive study of the Indian rebellion in British literature, identifies Edward Money's The Wife and the Ward, or, A Life's Error (1859) as the first novel to treat the rebellion directly (5).Footnote ⁸ It is, however, barely a novel. The last six chapters, as Chakravarty argues, form an historical record, not an imaginative recreation (110–13). Indeed, Money seems to be entirely ill at ease in the register of fiction, interrupting his narrative at regular intervals to try to account for the ability of his omniscient narrator to, for example, be in two places at once (56, ch. 5), or to stay outside in the oppressive heat (43–49; ch. 4). The novel is a thinly-disguised history of the siege at Kanpur, which stops just short of the violent sensationalism of the accounts of that siege that were published throughout 1857 and 1858. Money does, however, append to the novel a dispatch from “the London papers” describing the final scenes at Kanpur, when those who were trying to escape were killed as they were pushing off from the Satichaura Ghat (405–07; postscript). The narrative that Money claims as his own may stop short of horrifying violence, but his inclusion of this journalistic account ensures that the novel becomes, in retrospect, a long preparation for a horrific account of slaughter and suffering.

Money's awkward history/novel may have been the first to address the rebellion directly, but Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins published a short novel on rebellion as the Christmas number of Household Words in 1857. “The Perils of Certain English Prisoners” is set in an unnamed English settlement in Central America in 1754. The narrator, an illiterate Royal Marines private who “never did like Natives, except in the form of oysters,” finds himself caught up in a siege and capture of mostly women and children (4).Footnote ⁹ Along with the daughter of the commander of the town's garrison, he thwarts the pirates who take them captive and engineers an escape that is bloodless, except for the killing of a reviled traitor. The plot differs substantially from The Wife and the Ward; “The Perils” is an allegory, but moreover, it ends in victory and revenge rather than death and defeat. Its status as allegory is also somewhat different from that of Owenson's novel. As Patrick Brantlinger observes, setting the action in the West rather than East Indies does not provide a dispassionate distance from which to observe the rebellion. Rather, it extends Dickens's view of the Mutiny to other parts of the empire. Though “The Perils” is not blood-soaked, it pulses with the anger Dickens expressed in a letter in October of that year, in which he wrote that he wished to do his utmost “to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested” (qtd. in Brantlinger 207).

“The Perils,” The Wife and the Ward, and Luxima are the only three novels dealing with the rebellion to appear in the 1850s. The next novel to be published – a rather confused offering from H. P. Malet entitled Lost Links in the Indian Mutiny – did not appear until 1867. This is followed in 1868 by James Grant's First Love and Last Love, which begins on the eve of the rebellion and follows through to bloodthirsty revenge, or “the pleasing work of pillage and destruction” (409; ch. 75). Meadows Taylor's Seeta, influenced in large measure by Luxima, is the next to appear in 1872. Novels with the rebellion as their subject were slow to appear, and it was not until the 1890s that a critical mass emerged (Chakravarty 6). If there is such a genre as the “Mutiny novel,” the 1890s may have been its heyday. The linking of generic forms and thematic concerns cannot, however, be taken for granted. Rather than thinking of the “Mutiny novel” as genre, it might be more fruitful to consider that the imperial adventure novel rediscovers the Indian rebellion and recasts it, forty years on, as a stage for heroism and triumph, not failure, death, and near-destruction. The very first novels published after the rebellion, though at times thirsty for revenge, lack the myopic jingoism of the imperial adventures of the 1890s, which are written in a rather different imperial climate.

When Owenson rewrites her “Indian tale” it is against the backdrop of reports of the sort of atrocities that end Edward Money's tale, and of Dickens and Collins's tale, with its strains of vengeance. While Money, Malet, Grant, and Dickens and Collins do not approach the triumphalism of the imperial adventure, theirs are, nonetheless, novels that preview the genre. Owenson's rewritten tale both forms part of this novelistic tradition and stands critically outside it. It is backward-looking insofar as its original frames of reference were the Vellore mutiny, debates about the civilizing mission, and the renewal of the East India Company's charter. Yet it is also proleptic, a cautionary tale about the violence of the imperial project and the potential for failure that is so deeply embedded in imperialism. Luxima greatly influenced at least one other novel of the rebellion, Meadows Taylor's Seeta (1872), a tale of interracial love and conversion that rejects the easy violence and bigotry of other novels of the rebellion. Taylor writes that he “purposely avoided the sickening details of pitiless massacre and suffering, which have already been illustrated by many writers, and which, of necessity, must be repeated in Sir John Kaye's history” (viii; introduction), turning instead to a criticism of colonial policy and a moral idealism that finds its analogue in Kipling (Brantlinger 212–16). Brantlinger, in singling out Seeta as perhaps the only novel that approaches the rebellion with sympathy and self-reflection, doesn't mention Owenson, though Taylor's debts are clear, and are acknowledged by Chakravarty (84). Perhaps Meadows Taylor offers the clearest reading of Owenson's revisions, by acknowledging that the situation in India has been “greatly altered,” and that the appropriate literary response should lie, as Luxima does, somewhere between the affect of the imperial romance and the triumphalism of the imperial adventure.