author

Fanny Parkes Parlby

1794–1875

An adventurous travel writer who spent nearly a quarter century in India, she turned close observation and curiosity into one of the liveliest British memoirs of the period. Her work is still valued for the vivid way it records everyday life, landscapes, and encounters across the subcontinent.

3 Audiobooks

Grand moving diorama of Hindostan : displaying the scenery of the Hoogly, the Bhagirathi, and the Ganges, from Fort William, Bengal, to Gangoutri, in the Himalaya

Grand moving diorama of Hindostan : displaying the scenery of the Hoogly, the Bhagirathi, and the Ganges, from Fort William, Bengal, to Gangoutri, in the Himalaya

by Fanny Parkes Parlby

Wanderings of a pilgrim in search of the picturesque, Volume 1 (of 2) : During four-and-twenty years in the east; with revelations of life in the zenāna

Wanderings of a pilgrim in search of the picturesque, Volume 1 (of 2) : During four-and-twenty years in the east; with revelations of life in the zenāna

by Fanny Parkes Parlby

Wanderings of a pilgrim in search of the picturesque, Volume 2 (of 2) : During four-and-twenty years in the east; with revelations of life in the zenāna

Wanderings of a pilgrim in search of the picturesque, Volume 2 (of 2) : During four-and-twenty years in the east; with revelations of life in the zenāna

by Fanny Parkes Parlby

About the author

Born Frances Susanna Archer in Wales in 1794, she is better known as Fanny Parkes Parlby or Fanny Parkes. After marrying Charles Crawford Parkes of the East India Company, she went to India in the 1820s and remained there for about twenty-four years, traveling widely and writing detailed journals along the way.

Those experiences became Wanderings of a Pilgrim in Search of the Picturesque (1850), the book for which she is best remembered. Readers have continued to value it for its lively descriptions of travel, local customs, domestic life, and the people she met, as well as for the unusual independence and curiosity she brought to her journeys.

Parkes died in 1875. Her writing remains an important window onto nineteenth-century India, not because it is neutral or complete, but because it preserves a rich, personal record of what she saw and how intensely she wanted to understand the world around her.