Requital

Katherine Helen Maud Marshall was born on the 9th September 1867 in Murree, then part of British India, but now Pakistan. For much of her early years she was raised in India and Sri Lanka but returned to England to receive her education. Around 1896 she married Thomas Diver, an officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Some years later they returned to England to settle and raise their son. In 1907 her first novel, Captain Desmond VC., was published. This and later works were commercially successful. She specialised in the popular genre of imperial romance and whilst they depicted how the English should behave in India, they also included, somewhat daringly for their time, accounts of mixed marriages. She was a literary contemporary of Kipling’s and great friends with his sister. During Diver’s literary career she wrote novels, short stories, biographies, histories and journalistic items on Indian topics and the English in India. She faded into obscurity after her death. Her philosophy can best be summed up with her words:- ‘’East and West are not antagonistic, but complementary: heart and head, thought and action, woman and man. Between all these 'pairs of opposites' fusion is rare, difficult, yet eminently possible. Why not, then, between East and West?’’ Maud Diver died on the 14th October 1945. She was 78.