SOURCE: “The Hill of Devi and Heat and Dust,” in Essays in Criticism, Vol. 36, No. 2, April, 1986, pp. 142-59.

In the following essay, Cronin discusses the relationship between Jhabvala and her literary predecessors, whom Cronin describes as “the Englishmen who described life in Indian princely states in the 1920s.”

In Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's novel Heat and Dust (1975) two stories alternate, the story of a young English girl who goes to India in search of her family history, and the story of her grandfather's first wife, Olivia. The two stories approach each other, and drift apart. They coincide just once, at Baba Firdaus's shrine, where both women conceive a child, Olivia by the Nawab of Khatm, the modern girl by Inder Lal, a clerk. After aborting the child Olivia retreats to the mountains, and lives out her life silently, brooding, one supposes, on the past. The other girl goes to...