E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

Born in Calcutta in 1865 as Ethel Winifred Bryning, she later married John Angelo Henry Savi and spent much of her early married life in rural Bengal. Sources describe her as privately educated, the daughter of a ship's officer, and a writer who contributed short stories to Indian and English journals before becoming widely known as a novelist.

Her fiction is closely linked with British India. A biographical source notes that the first twelve years of her marriage were spent at Udhua Nullah on the Ganges, where she studied Indian life at first hand, and that experience fed into many of her novels. She also wrote autobiography, including My Own Story, published in 1947.

She was an extraordinarily productive writer. A newspaper notice published at the time of her death in 1954 said she had written 88 novels over 40 years, helping explain why her name still turns up so often in older library catalogs and reprints of popular early twentieth-century fiction.