Alice Perrin was born in India in 1867, the daughter of Major General John Innes Robinson, of the Bengal Cavalry, and Bertha Beidermann Robinson.

After her education in England, Perrin married Charles Perrin (d. 1931), an engineer in the India Public Works Department, in 1886, and the couple returned to India for the next sixteen years. They had a son, Lancelot Charles Perrin (born c.1889), who later worked in the Irrigation Branch of the Indian Public Works and married Vera Alexandrina St. John in November 1913.

After the Perrins’ return to England, Charles worked for the London Water Board and the Ministry of Health. Perrin’s career as a popular Anglo-Indian novelist and short story writer began with the two-volume novel Into Temptation, published in 1894. Her first collection of short stories, East of Suez, appeared in 1901. She continued publishing novels every two to three years until her last novel, Other Sheep, was published in 1932, two years before her death in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1934. In total, she published seventeen novels, many of which focus on the British colonial experience in India, such as The Spell of the Jungle (1902), The Anglo-Indians (1912), The Happy Hunting Ground (1914), Star of India (1919), and Government House (1925).

East of Suez: Stories of Love, Betrayal & Hauntings from the Raj
Alice Perrin
“One of the many lessons that the great Mother India instils into the hearts of her white foster children is to sympathise with one another’s troubles and misfortunes however trivial or however serious” (p 133).