ABSTRACT
Ella Doveton was born in Bombay, where her father Bazett Doveton was a civil servant, and spent much of her childhood there. She married William Meybohm Haggard in 1844, bringing with her a considerable fortune, which he invested in land, losing much of it in the process. The poem appeared in the first months of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, an event both acknowledged and disclaimed as a context for the work. A review of the poem in Allen’s Indian Mail approved of the plot, which it recounts in some detail, but deplored the tendency of the ‘really talented author’ to ‘invest it in a garb beyond her powers of construction’: prose, in the reviewer’s opinion, would have suited her better than poetry. Although Myra: or, The Rose of the East did not appear in print until 1857, it was at least begun long before then, according to the author’s note to Canto IV which dates it to 1849.
