Alice Perrin


Alice Perrin or Alice Robinson was a British novelist who wrote about the British in colonial India. She became successful after the publication of her short ghost story collection East of Suez.

Life

Perrin was born in the hill station of Mussoorie in Anglo-India in 1867. Her parents were Bertha and her second husband John Innes Robinson. Her father would become a Major General in the Bengal Cavalry. and her great grandfather, Sir George Robinson, 1st Baronet had been a director of the East India Company. She was sent to England where she went to school and when she returned she married an engineer named Charles Perrin on 26 May 1886 in Dehra. Once married and after the birth of their only child she took to writing to relieve the boredom of life in India for a British woman. She publish a short story titled Caulfield's Crime in the 1892 Belgravia Annual.
for "Beynon of the Irrigation Department"
Her debut books were Into Temptation and Late in Life which were both two volume novels and published in 1894 and 1896. She would eventually publish seventeen novels.
Her writing became popular after the first of her collections of short ghost stories was published. East of Suez sold well and her writing was compared to Rudyard Kipling where in places Punch considered her writing better.
Perrin wrote about the missionaries in India and she was not enthusiastic about them. The History of British India considers three books significant on missionaries to India. These were The Old Missionary by William Wilson Hunter, The Hosts of the Lord by Flora Annie Steel and Perrin's 1909 book Idolatry.
Perrin and her husband moved to Switzerland in 1925 and three years later her only child died in London. She died in Vaud in 1934.

Selected works