Bithia Mary Croker

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. She also wrote ghost stories.

Life Croker was born in 1847 in Warrenpoint, County Down, Northern Ireland. Her birth year was not publicly known for a long time, which is why later years are also stated sometimes. She was the only daughter of Rev. William Sheppard, the Anglican Church of Ireland rector of Kilgefin, County Roscommon, who was an ex-barrister, and Bithia Mary Sheppard. Her younger brother William Harry Cope Sheppard went on to become president of the Dublin rugby union club Wanderers F. C. Her father died in 1855 after a protracted illness, when Bithia was eight years old. She spent parts of her childhood in Roscommon and was educated at Rock Ferry, Cheshire and in Tours, France. She became famous as a horsewoman with the Kildare Hunt.

In 1871, she married John Stokes Croker, an officer in the Royal Scots Fusiliers and later the Royal Munster Fusiliers, in Rathangan, County Kildare, and they lived there for some time in Oakley House. Soon after, Croker followed her husband to Madras and then to Bengal. Exclusive of trips home, she lived in India for 14 years between 1872 and 1892. Her only child, Gertrude Eileen Celeste Croker, was born in Bangalore in December 1872 and baptized in Madras in January 1873. Croker remained immensely interested in reading, travel and theatre. She died at 30 Dorset Square, London, on 20 October 1920 and was buried in Folkestone.

Her first novel, Proper Pride (1882), was written secretly in Secunderabad in 1880, then read aloud to other women. 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. Thought to be by a man, it received good reviews and had been reprinted 12 times by 1896. William Ewart Gladstone was observed reading it in the House of Commons.

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. She was the most published author in the popular German low-budget edition Engelhorns allgemeine Romanbibliothek (Engelhorn's general novel library, 1884–1930), with 31 of her novels and story collections published in German translations, ahead of German Richard Voss (25) and French Georges Ohnet (21).

Croker had a wide literary acquaintance in London. Her novel Angel (1901) was dedicated to another novelist whose work centres on India: Alice Perrin.

A volume of her ghost stories was edited by Richard Dalby at the turn of the millennium. Her story To Let (c. 1893) was included in The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories.