ABSTRACT
Together with the rest of the British population in Lucknow, more than 200 women lived under siege for five months at the height of the Indian ‘mutiny5 in 1857. Events in India in 1857 posed an unprecedented threat to British rule in India, and graphic descriptions of the deaths and suffering of British women and children came to embody the severity of this threat (Sharpe, 1993; Tuson, 1998; Blunt, 2000). Most famously, more than 200 British women and children were killed at Cawnpore in July 1857, and their deaths were used to justify extreme levels of retribution. But, in contrast, only forty miles away, more than 200 British women and children survived the siege of Lucknow. This article examines six book-length diaries written by British women at Lucknow, four of which were published during the authors5 lifetimes and two of which were first published one century after they had been written (Bartrum, 1858; Case, 1858; Harris, 1858; Inglis, 1892, Germon, 1957; Brydon, 1978). It is likely that other women also wrote diaries that did not survive the siege or the evacuation from Lucknow, were subsequently lost or destroyed, or remain in private col lections. The surviving diaries describe daily domestic life under siege and inscribe a crisis of imperial rule on a domestic scale. But, unlike representations of embodied and domestic defilement that dominated other accounts and objec tified British women as victims of the conflict, the diaries written by British women at Lucknow document their survival. Rather than explore representa tions o f British women during the conflict, this article concentrates on repre-
Table 1. British women diarists at Lucknow, 1857
Katherine Bartrum Book-length diary published in 1858. Married to an army doctor with one young son. Travelled eighty miles from Gonda to Lucknow at the start of the siege. Her husband died as part of the first relief forces in September, and her son died in Calcutta in January 1858.
