Jane, Lady Munro
(1790-1850), Wife of Sir Thomas MunroRegency Portraits Catalogue Entry
Sitter in 1 portrait
by Sir Martin Archer Shee
oil on canvas, 1819
NPG 3124a
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Professor Stephen Martin
24 September 2021, 05:31
The importance of Jane Munro is that she was instrumental in working with her husband on surveying the poor state of education for girls in India and supporting the effort to develop local native magistrates in Indian villages in the Regency period. It is rare for British women in India at the time to have contemporary documented evidence of what they did and very rare for it to have been altruistic. She was born in Maybole, Ayrshire on 19 January, 1795, where her mother must have been lying in at Jane's grandmother's. She grew up in the magnificent Craigie House by the river in Ayr, inherited by her farmer father and now part of the University of the West of Scotland. She had two sons, giving birth to one on a journey home from India in St Helena. Her grandson was the great mountaineer Hugh Munro who listed the high Scottish peaks. Her dress reflects her husband's robes as a Baronet, though there were no Baroness robes at the time. Similar male robe emulation was worn by women at the Coronation of George IV, which can be seen as provoking an intrusion into male dress and wearing the same emblems. The pearls would have come from Tamil Nadu, where Jane had lived in Madras, now Chennai. She was ill for a year in India around 1821 with an eye injury from a riding accident. Jane was widowed at a young age after her husband died of cholera on his last tour to try to help rural Andhra Pradesh. He is also rare in continuing to draw attention from Indian historians for his good works. Jane died on 2 September, 1850 and she is commemorated in W H Playfair's handsome family mausoleum at Auchincruive Church, St Quivox village, Ayrshire.