Post/Colonial Nostalgia and Melancholia in Dinah Jefferies' The Tea Planter's Wife and Before the Rains *

I'm not entirely sure these texts are romances, but from what I can tell they do have central romantic relationshps and the novels end with the characters together, even if not entirely happily in The Tea Planter's Wife. I'm only judging how romance-like they are on the basis of spoilers I found in book reviews so I could be wrong. Here's the abstract:

This chapter analyses how Dinah Jefferies' bestselling novels, The Tea Planter's Wife (2015) and Before the Rains (2017), exhibit colonial nostalgia that is intricately braided with what Paul Gilroy calls “post-colonial melancholia”. Set in Ceylon and the British Raj during the early twentieth century, these heavily intertextual novels exemplify colonial nostalgia because they reproduce the colonial discourse, themes, and conventions characteristic of travel writing and British Raj fiction, especially colonial Raj romances. They pander to the desire for nostalgic consumption by displaying the colonies as exotic, orientalised luxury goods and experiences. However, the novels also reference the colonial and post-colonial Gothic traditions. We argue that, in line with more contemporary discomfort with Britain's imperial past, Jefferies' recourse to post/colonial Gothic elements creates opportunities to challenge the racist assumptions of colonialism. This challenge is most fully articulated in her condemnation of historical British relations with the colonised, which results in her tentative engagement with anti-colonial sentiments. In so doing, her novels begin a limited work of revising and repairing the traditional colonial romance, particularly through the depiction of interracial love stories.

and here's the description of this essay which appears in the Introduction to the volume:

The volume closes with a chapter co-authored by Hsu-Ming Teo and Astrid Schwegler-Castañer on two romantic novels set in colonial Asia, Dinah Jefferies’ The Tea Planter’s Wife (2015) and Before the Rains (2017), respectively set in Ceylon and India in the first half of the twentieth century. Jefferies’ novels are analysed as contemporary manifestations of colonial nostalgia that recreate the British empire as exotic luxury goods and narratives to indulge a melancholic but pleasurable longing for an elegant and idyllic imperial past. This chapter considers the tensions that arise between the author’s attempt to pander the needs of her readers for exoticism and colonial glamour and her acknowledgement of the damaging and traumatic legacies of the British Empire. The authors argue that Jefferies negotiates these contradictory impulses by interrogating the racial and gender politics of Raj romances and by playing with their plots and motifs through the use of the post/colonial Gothic mode. As the au-
thors conclude, however, these reparative moves are insufficient and ineffective because Jefferies’ novels are still subservient to the depiction of a romantic and exotic South Asia.