Alice Maude Sorabji Pennell

Ailsa Sorabji

Mrs Theodore Pennell

Findon, Sussex

Not before 1894, perhaps nearer to 1899; medical training until 1905; visit 1910; from 1920s to death in 1951, between extended visits to India and travels in America, Europe and the Middle East

Alice Maude (Sorabji) Pennell was born in Belgaum, India on 17 July 1874, the youngest of eight children of Sorabji Kharsedji and Franscina Sorabji. The family were descended from a small Zoroastrian community and Kharsedji was one of the earliest converts to Christianity. Settled in Poona, where Franscina founded and ran the Victoria High School, the children were, like their parents, ‘brought up English’, with strong educational values.

Alice travelled to England in the late 1890s. After qualifying at the London School of Medicine, in 1905 she returned to India and was working as a doctor at the Zenana Hospital in Bahawalpur when she first met the British missionary doctor Theodore Leighton Pennell in 1906. He had established a mission hospital at Bannu on the North-West Frontier and was renowned for adopting native dress and travelling unarmed in the hostile tribal areas; it was said that ‘the presence of Pennell on the Frontier is equal to that of two British regiments’.

Married in 1908 and widowed in 1912, when Theodore died from blood poisoning, Pennell was awarded an OBE for her work at Bannu, where she remained until after the Third Anglo-Afghan War (1919). By 1925 she was living in London and had written her first novel, which she successfully submitted to John Murray for publication as Children of the Border, relating the life of an Afghan chieftain’s wife on the Frontier. The Begum’s Son was published in 1928 and Doorways of the East, which dealt with ‘modern affairs, unrest and political strife’, in 1931. This latter was intended by Pennell as a call for friendship and understanding between India and Britain during the Round Table Conferences (1930–2). None of her books sold beyond their original print runs of 2,000 copies, and the latter two made losses for the publishers, who rejected her fourth novel, about an Afghan woman’s revenge.

During the 1930s and 1940s Pennell gave talks on Indian life, women and health at various literary and medical venues, including a radio broadcast in 1929 for the Life in Foreign Lands series. She travelled widely, often with her friend Queen Elisabeth of Greece, and addressed groups of women doctors and other professional women – Austrian and American – while visiting Vienna, glad of the ‘many opportunities of speaking of the British point of view – and that of us who are loyal to Britain’. This was especially to counterbalance the widespread influences of both ‘our megalomaniac Gandhi’ and the American Katherine Mayo’s imperialist diatribe Mother India, considered by Pennell to be ‘not always true and very one sided’. It was support for this controversial book which damaged the social and political standing in India of her sister Cornelia Sorabji, one of the first women lawyers and a prolific author herself.

Pennell died at the Convent of the Holy Rood in Findon, Sussex on 7 March 1951. Her obituary in The Times, written by her friend Brenda Spender, literary editor of Country Life, noted that like all the ‘outstanding personalities’ of the Sorabji family, Pennell ‘bore the hall-mark of fervent Christianity and complete devotion to the British throne’.