The Fishing Fleet - by Anne De Courcy (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published: United Kingdom: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2012.

From the Back Cover

By the late nineteenth century, Britain's colonial reign seemed to know no limit--and India was the sparkling jewel in the Imperial crown. Many of Her Majesty's best and brightest young men departed for the Raj to make their careers, and their fortunes, as bureaucrats, soldiers, and businessmen. But in their wake they left behind countless young ladies who, suddenly bereft of eligible bachelors, found themselves facing an uncertain future. With nothing to lose and everything to gain, some of these women decided to follow suit and abandon their native Britain for India's exotic glamour and--with men outnumbering women by roughly four to one in the Raj--the best chance they had at finding a husband.

Drawing on a wealth of firsthand sources, including unpublished memoirs, letters, photographs, and diaries, Anne de Courcy brings the incredible world of "the Fishing Fleet," as these women were known, to life. In these sparkling pages, she describes the glittering whirlwind of dances, parties, tennis tournaments, tiger shoots, and palatial banquets that awaited in the Raj, all geared toward the prospect of romance. Most of the girls were away from home for the first time, and they plunged headlong into the heady dazzle of expatriate social life; marriages were frequent. However, after the honeymoon many women were confronted with a reality that was far from the fairy tale they'd been chasing.

Rich with drama and color, The Fishing Fleet is a sumptuous, utterly compelling real-life saga of adventure, romance, and heartbreak in the heyday of the British Empire.

Review Quotes

"Vividly sketches the lives lived in this strange limbo...richly entertaining." - Boston Globe
"Boarding a boat to Bombay to catch a man might sound like a desperate measure, but in Victorian times, it wasn't such a far-fetched plan.... Enter the Fishing Fleet, boatfuls of young women who came to India to seek their fortune, too....In her lively history, de Courcy focuses particularly on 20th-century husband hunters, those whose journey was part of 'the last flowering of the British Raj' before India's independence. Their colorful diary entries and letters provide a lens into the courtship rituals and, more broadly, extravagant existence and comically overwrought regal rituals of the ruling class." - Daily Beast
A "lively history.... Colorful." - Daily Beast
"Journalist De Courcy provides a fascinating account--not quite gossipy but loaded with juicy anecdotes--of adventurous women sailing for the subcontinent in the 19th and early 20th centuries to fulfill their destinies as wives." - Publishers Weekly
"De Courcy's sympathetic but critical account is based on extensive and exclusive access to Mosley herself and her papers, suggests that Diana was unaware of the extent of the brutality of the Nazi regimes - and that, despite her own anti-Semitism, her politics were the sum of her blind romantic and sexual desires. This is a thorough, nuanced reading of a complicated woman, but even more ambitiously, de Courcy has painted her as an icon of between-the-wars Europe, with its crumbling social structure and decadent, violent attempts at self-preservation." - Publishers Weekly on Diana Mosley
"The contrasts are irresistibly melodramatic, the characters colorful yet tantalizingly repressed. .... It is enough to make you wonder why Julian Fellowes hasn't sent a few more members of the Downton Abbey cast on the heels of Miss O'Brien, seeking their fortunes in Delhi and beyond..." - New York Times Book Review
"Making liberal use of letters and journals, The Fishing Fleet paints a fascinating picture of these women and their history...a glimpse of a unique era." - Minneapolis Star Tribune