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The Woman in the Bazaar
‘He was living once more in those far-away days that had begun with such happiness, only to end in such failure and pain […] and now a result had arisen, alive and awful and tragic—the woman in the bazaar!’
On leave in England from his regimental duties in British India, Captain George Coventry falls in love with the vicar’s daughter, Rafella Forte. After a brief courtship they marry and move to India. Rafella is a devoted wife and George is glad to have her for a partner, but when she strikes up a friendship with Mr Kennard, a handsome barrister, George assumes the worst. In a fit of jealous rage, he terrorizes his young wife and she escapes into the night, never to be seen again.
Years later, when he is given another chance at love with the young, outgoing beauty Trixie Munro, George must face down his dark past. He must also contend with the ‘woman in the bazaar’—an increasingly persistent and bloodcurdling rumour of an Englishwoman sold into slavery—a horror he fears he might have wrought on his first wife.
A compelling portrait of marriage and jealousy written in fluid prose, The Woman in the Bazaar is compulsively readable and one of the finest novels of the Raj era. Once a popular writer with many bestsellers to her credit, Alice Perrin is now being rediscovered for her memorable yarns of British life in India
On leave in England from his regimental duties in British India, Captain George Coventry falls in love with the vicar’s daughter, Rafella Forte. After a brief courtship they marry and move to India. Rafella is a devoted wife and George is glad to have her for a partner, but when she strikes up a friendship with Mr Kennard, a handsome barrister, George assumes the worst. In a fit of jealous rage, he terrorizes his young wife and she escapes into the night, never to be seen again.
Years later, when he is given another chance at love with the young, outgoing beauty Trixie Munro, George must face down his dark past. He must also contend with the ‘woman in the bazaar’—an increasingly persistent and bloodcurdling rumour of an Englishwoman sold into slavery—a horror he fears he might have wrought on his first wife.
A compelling portrait of marriage and jealousy written in fluid prose, The Woman in the Bazaar is compulsively readable and one of the finest novels of the Raj era. Once a popular writer with many bestsellers to her credit, Alice Perrin is now being rediscovered for her memorable yarns of British life in India
250 pages, Paperback
Published March 6, 2017
35 people want to read
About the author
Alice Perrin
72 books7 followersAlice Perrin was born in India in 1867, the daughter of Major General John Innes Robinson, of the Bengal Cavalry, and Bertha Beidermann Robinson. After her education in England, Perrin married Charles Perrin (d. 1931), an engineer in the India Public Works Department, in 1886, and the couple returned to India for the next sixteen years. Perrin’s career as a popular Anglo-Indian novelist and short story writer began with the two-volume novel Into Temptation, published in 1894. Her first collection of short stories, East of Suez, appeared in 1901. She continued publishing novels every two to three years until her last novel, Other Sheep, was published in 1932, two years before her death in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1934. In total, she published seventeen novels, many of which focus on the British colonial experience in India, such as The Spell of the Jungle (1902), The Anglo-Indians (1912), The Happy Hunting Ground (1914), Star of India (1919), and Government House (1925).
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 14, 2021
July 12, 1045am ~~ Review asap.
July 14, 1pm ~~ Alice Perrin was my choice for a Literary Birthday challenge for July. The official book I read for that challenge was Star Of India. But there was another at Perrin's author page at Project Gutenberg so I decided to read it also.
I gave both books three stars, which for me means exactly what the GR guidelines suggest: I liked the books. But I liked The Woman In The Bazaar more than I liked Star Of India, because the characters appealed to me more and were less annoying, even though the plots were similar: young woman marries older man, faces life in completely different surroundings than she is used to, gets into trouble which may or may not be innocent, and everyone deals with the consequences.
Rafella Forte known as Ella, is 'barely 21' and living in a remote English parish house with her father when she meets George Coventry, who is on a short home leave from India and visiting his mother and sister in a fairly nearby town. One day while riding his horse he sees Ella in her garden, falls in love with the vision before him, and determines to have her as his wife.
I didn't like Coventry, of course. How could any modern woman like even a fictional character with this attitude:
He had no desire for an intellectual wife; in his opinion the more women knew the more objectionable they became. George Coventry was the kind of man who could contemplate matrimony only under conditions of supreme possession, mental as well as physical. What his wife learnt of life he must be the one to teach her; there must be no knowledge, no memory in her heart of which he might have reason to feel jealous in the most remote degree.
Piffle. Enough said about that.
In India we all try to adapt but Ella is so naive and innocent that she has no idea how to handle many circumstances that arise, and Coventry is off doing his own thing all the time: polo, shooting, all those manly pursuits that were so important to the British while in India.
Naturally there is a scandalous crisis and then from one chapter to the next we jump ahead in time sixteen years. We are back in England and someone is to be married. A girl we first met slightly on the very day Coventry and his wife arrived in India. Then she was being sent Home for school. Now she is to be married and return to India. Who does she marry? How will this relationship evolve? What does that woman in the bazaar have to do with anything?
As I said, I liked this book better than Star Of India. This was not only a captivating story on its surface: there were ideas put across about British life in India, about developing a meaningful and mature relationship between husband and wife, about facing oneself in the mirror and admitting that you may have caused the destruction in your past and only you can decide whether or not to repeat the pattern.
July 14, 1pm ~~ Alice Perrin was my choice for a Literary Birthday challenge for July. The official book I read for that challenge was Star Of India. But there was another at Perrin's author page at Project Gutenberg so I decided to read it also.
I gave both books three stars, which for me means exactly what the GR guidelines suggest: I liked the books. But I liked The Woman In The Bazaar more than I liked Star Of India, because the characters appealed to me more and were less annoying, even though the plots were similar: young woman marries older man, faces life in completely different surroundings than she is used to, gets into trouble which may or may not be innocent, and everyone deals with the consequences.
Rafella Forte known as Ella, is 'barely 21' and living in a remote English parish house with her father when she meets George Coventry, who is on a short home leave from India and visiting his mother and sister in a fairly nearby town. One day while riding his horse he sees Ella in her garden, falls in love with the vision before him, and determines to have her as his wife.
I didn't like Coventry, of course. How could any modern woman like even a fictional character with this attitude:
He had no desire for an intellectual wife; in his opinion the more women knew the more objectionable they became. George Coventry was the kind of man who could contemplate matrimony only under conditions of supreme possession, mental as well as physical. What his wife learnt of life he must be the one to teach her; there must be no knowledge, no memory in her heart of which he might have reason to feel jealous in the most remote degree.
Piffle. Enough said about that.
In India we all try to adapt but Ella is so naive and innocent that she has no idea how to handle many circumstances that arise, and Coventry is off doing his own thing all the time: polo, shooting, all those manly pursuits that were so important to the British while in India.
Naturally there is a scandalous crisis and then from one chapter to the next we jump ahead in time sixteen years. We are back in England and someone is to be married. A girl we first met slightly on the very day Coventry and his wife arrived in India. Then she was being sent Home for school. Now she is to be married and return to India. Who does she marry? How will this relationship evolve? What does that woman in the bazaar have to do with anything?
As I said, I liked this book better than Star Of India. This was not only a captivating story on its surface: there were ideas put across about British life in India, about developing a meaningful and mature relationship between husband and wife, about facing oneself in the mirror and admitting that you may have caused the destruction in your past and only you can decide whether or not to repeat the pattern.
January 15, 2018
The Woman in the Bazaar is a story set in the colonial times, moving (in no particular pace) between India and England. It's the story of Colonel Coventry, who holds very archaic ideas - even for those times - on propriety, women, and conduct. He's a portrait of the quintessential prude, with a generous lacquer of chauvinism to coat! His ideal woman is one who is pure, innocent, dutiful, knows little of the world, and experiences new things only through the tutelage of her husband.
Colonel Coventry goes on to fall in love (at first sight) with Rafella Forte, a parish priest's daughter from a small town. He courts her for three weeks, and marries her in a few more, bringing the significantly young and naive Rafella back to his regiment in India.
During the colonial times, the British posted in India lived a life of extravagance and luxury which they could have ill afforded back in London. Large bungalows, a multitude of servants, glamorous regiment dances and parties, summers spent holidaying in the hills, were but a few high points of their Indian "exile" - as the book still insisted on calling it! When a simple minded girl like Rafella is thrown into this whirlwind of high society, her eventual deterioration is inevitable, accelerated by her husband's intolerance, jealousy, and dominant behavior.
The book essentially chronicles how Coventry's first marriage falls apart, and how the second one (embarked upon after a significant number of years), survives through the same obstacle course. In itself the story is wholesome enough, but what was interesting for me was the attitude of the writer (and the colonial British mind by extension) towards India, and its way of life!
It unintentionally gives you a fair glimpse of how self absorbed and racist the majority of those times were! Although more than 60% of the story is set in India, the writer has put in no effort in researching the backdrop, details of which might have enhanced the story. There's no mention of which state/city the regiments are located in, except the generic "Northern India". The few times the native language is mentioned, it's generalized into "Hindustani" because, yes, that's what we speak across India. The weather is constantly described as hot, dry, and relentless. The "natives" are, in the writer's eye, scantily clad, dark people. No attempts are made to describe the culture of the place the characters are based in, and in the last chapter, the description of the bazaar is a paragon of this supremacist attitude culminating in a grand finale.
If you do give this book a read, don't do it for the story. Do it to study the smallness of mind that is apparent through the things that are not said, and a few things that are said unwittingly.
Colonel Coventry goes on to fall in love (at first sight) with Rafella Forte, a parish priest's daughter from a small town. He courts her for three weeks, and marries her in a few more, bringing the significantly young and naive Rafella back to his regiment in India.
During the colonial times, the British posted in India lived a life of extravagance and luxury which they could have ill afforded back in London. Large bungalows, a multitude of servants, glamorous regiment dances and parties, summers spent holidaying in the hills, were but a few high points of their Indian "exile" - as the book still insisted on calling it! When a simple minded girl like Rafella is thrown into this whirlwind of high society, her eventual deterioration is inevitable, accelerated by her husband's intolerance, jealousy, and dominant behavior.
The book essentially chronicles how Coventry's first marriage falls apart, and how the second one (embarked upon after a significant number of years), survives through the same obstacle course. In itself the story is wholesome enough, but what was interesting for me was the attitude of the writer (and the colonial British mind by extension) towards India, and its way of life!
It unintentionally gives you a fair glimpse of how self absorbed and racist the majority of those times were! Although more than 60% of the story is set in India, the writer has put in no effort in researching the backdrop, details of which might have enhanced the story. There's no mention of which state/city the regiments are located in, except the generic "Northern India". The few times the native language is mentioned, it's generalized into "Hindustani" because, yes, that's what we speak across India. The weather is constantly described as hot, dry, and relentless. The "natives" are, in the writer's eye, scantily clad, dark people. No attempts are made to describe the culture of the place the characters are based in, and in the last chapter, the description of the bazaar is a paragon of this supremacist attitude culminating in a grand finale.
If you do give this book a read, don't do it for the story. Do it to study the smallness of mind that is apparent through the things that are not said, and a few things that are said unwittingly.
December 31, 2025
Entiendo a dónde iba la autora pero el final no me convenció.
February 3, 2019
I really loved the way writer has shared the fear in the marriage and relationship but then how patience and understanding plays crucial role in removing the obstacles in one's relationship.
August 22, 2021
Excellent.
January 9, 2026
somehow it reminded me of A Thousand Splendid Suns
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews