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About The Book: Once upon a time there lived a young Brahmin and his wife in what would, judged even by the standard of asceticism of their class, be deemed extreme poverty. Dragging along a sort of dead-and-alive existence upon scanty and miserable fare, they were too proud to beg or borrow, and too honest to steal. Yet, for all this, their faith in Providence never wavered, but, on the other hand, they discerned in their present distress its iron hand forging for them a closely veiled destiny through its ever mysterious ways. Fortified in this belief, they bore with philosophy their adversity until the gloom thickened around them, unrelieved, as it seemed to them, by a single redeeming gleam of hope. One day, maddened by the sight of his starving wife (for to such straits had they been reduced) the young Brahmin set out towards the forest in search of wild roots and fruits for her, but alas no sooner had he got there than he found the forest on fire and its denizens, terror-stricken, fleeing away in all directions. About The Author: Shobhanasundari Mukhopadhyay (1877-1937) (born Shovona Devi Tagore in 1877 in Calcutta; died May 26, 1937 in Howrah) was an Indian writer, known for her collections of folktales. She was the daughter of Hemendranath Tagore and the niece of writer Rabindranath Tagore. The fifth daughter of Hemendranath Tagore, Shovona Devi Tagore was raised in an upper-class, English-educated Hindu family in Calcutta (Kolkata). She married Nagendranath Mukhopadhyay, who was an English professor in Jaipur. In 1923, her uncle Rabindranath Tagore wrote the letter-poem "Shillonger Chithi" ("Letter from Shillong") to a young Shovona. She died in 1937 at age sixty of complications relating to high blood pressure. The Orient Pearls was reviewed in publications such as The Dial and The Spectator and appeared in libraries around the world shortly after its publication. The book brought Bengali folktales to the attention of English-speaking folklorists around the world, who used it as a source in their comparative work, including new forms of computer-aided study. Her stories have been republished in recent academic collections of the writings of Indian women.