Bithia Mary Croker

Bithia Mary was an Irish novelist, most of whose work concerns life and society in British India. Her 1917 novel The Road to Mandalay, set in Burma, was the uncredited basis for a 1926 American silent film, of which only excerpts survive. She was also a notable writer of ghost stories.

Bithia was born in Kilgefin, County Roscommon, Ireland, the only daughter of Rev. William Sheppard (died 1856), the Anglican Church of Ireland rector of Kilgefin, County Roscommon, who was also a writer and controversialist. She was educated at Rockferry, Cheshire and in Tours, France. She became famous as a horsewoman with the Kildare Hunt. In 1871, she married John Stokes Croker (1844–1911), an officer in the Royal Scots Fusiliers and later the Royal Munster Fusiliers.

In 1877, Bithia followed her husband to Madras and then to Bengal. She lived in India for 14 years, spending some time in the hill station of Wellington now in Tamil Nadu, where she wrote many of her works, having begun to do so as a distraction during the hot season. After her husband's retirement with the rank of lieutenant-colonel in 1892, the couple moved to County Wicklow, then to London, and finally to Folkestone, Kent, where her husband died in 1911. She had one daughter, Eileen (born 1872), who was also educated at Rockferry. Bithia remained immensely interested in reading, travel and theatre. She died at 30 Dorset Square, London, on 20 October 1920 and was buried in Folkestone.

Croker had a wide literary acquaintance in London. Her novel Angel (1901) was dedicated to another novelist whose work centres on India: Alice Perrin. The author and academic Douglas Sladen went so far as to call her, with her "valued friends" Perrin and Flora Annie Steel, "three who have long divided the Indian Empire with Rudyard Kipling as a realm of fiction. Each in her own department is supreme."