Toru Dutt was born in Bengal, but her father wanted his daughters to have a Western education, so the family moved to France, where she learned both French and English. She traveled to England where for a brief while she attended special lectures for women at Cambridge and Italy. On her return home she published, at the age of twenty, her only volume of verse and died the next year. Virtually unknown during her brief lifetime, her work gave her some posthumous celebrity in Europe. Fond of Hindu myth but raised a Christian, loving both France and India, she illustrates the influence that colonialism had on many writers seeking an audience as she expresses her love for her home in English, which was not even her second language.

Website: http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_2/dutt.html