How to write about India? The novelist Elizabeth Bruce Elton Smith opens The East India Sketch-Book (1832) with this question. Her narrator itemises the tropes and genres available: a land of Arabian Nights exoticism, a country unchanged for 3,000 years, or a site to be mined for statistical information. Addressing a companion slumbering on a coach, the narrator reads aloud excerpts from half-written verse dramas, steeped in Romantic Orientalism, followed by entries from a journal of military life ('Twaddle!' comments the friend). Finally the narrator, lacking the necessary 'powers of attention and abstraction' to describe 'the length and breadth and height of mountains and minarets, palaces and pagodas, tanks and mausoleums', also rejects the travel account; 'besides', the narrator adds, 'you can learn all this from the thousand and one veracious Travels Through Hindostan'. Smith's introduction both justifies her own choice of the 'sketch-book' form and dramatises the sense of belatedness that haunts the early nineteenth-century travel writer: the conventions for representing India are already fixed, the genres well-worn, and the land over-described.