OUT in India, memories of Rievaulx and Arden tugged. "How I shall think of you all and Rievaulx and the beautiful Arden woods of last year," wrote Thirsk exile Elizabeth Smith.

She went on: "What a perfect day that was, and you will get dinner on the terrace and run races, and very likely go up Slip Ghyll. It makes me awfully homesick to think of it, I mustn't."

That was written to her sister, Gulie, in March, 1864. To their younger brother, nine-year-old Arthur, she wrote at the same time: "I am thinking today that thou wilt be having a holiday and going to Rievaulx and eating hot cross buns and having dinner on the temple steps in grand style."

The next sentence read: "There has been grand Hindoo holiday this week, and in honour of it the natives smear themselves and each other with yellow, crimson and scarlet powder, clothes an all, and this they never wash off until the holy days are over. They also paint stars of all colours on their faces."

The contrast mirrors the startling change when Elizabeth, at 23, swapped provincial England for a far-flung colony. Few did so in more eyebrow-raising circumstances.

Strict Quakers, who owned a draper's shop founded in 1580 - reputedly the oldest in England when it finally closed in 1971 - Elizabeth's parents were pillars of the Thirsk establishment.

Who would have expected them to allow Elizabeth to travel alone to India, to marry a man they had never met? But that's what happened. And what might have persuaded them was a perfectly-pitched letter from Elizabath's future husband, Henry Jacob, in Karachi, seeking her hand in marriage.

Writing with, as he put it, "considerable diffidence," he said: "Situated as I am many miles from England, I feel it is no light thing to ask for your daughter, but Elisa has given me good ground for hoping that she is not altogether indifferent to me."

Of his modest prospects in his job as book-keeper to a shipbuilding firm, he says: "For your daughter's sake I wish they were more brilliant, but the hope of winning her will not be worst incentive to exertion." His concluding paragraph begins: "I feel very deeply the confidence in me which prompts you to accept Elisa's version of my character, and trust I may never do anything to forfeit it."

Penned in 1863 this letter, along with about 50 others, mainly from Elizabeth to her parents, lay forgotten for more than century in a Victorian workbox, kept by a distant descendant of Elizabeth in his garage at Grange-over-Sands.

Recently, he showed them to another relative, Elizabeth's great great niece, Yvonne Bird. And now she presents them in a book which opens a vivid window on to the vanished colonial world, as experienced by one young woman.

Jingoism was at its height. On her voyage out, Elizabeth tells of the excitement at the prospect of overtaking a French steamer. "This will be national triumph and we shall play the national anthem and cheer immensely and be very proud of our superiority."

Indians were shamelessly patronised. From her Karachi bungalow Elizabeth wrote: "Harry has given me such a delightful little 'chokra' houseboy for my own, with a scarlet turban and blue coat - and such a nice face." And of a dinner party she reported: "There was our butler, Mrs Wilson's ditto, Mrs Lidbetter's ditto, and three gentlemen had each a butler, nine in all to wait upon 11 people there. They all looked so picturesque, with their dark faces, black moustaches and turbans ...".

But the colonies were never truly home for the colonists. In one letter Elizabeth speaks of her "banishment," and she also remarks: "You can tell nothing at home of how lovingly and longingly we think and speak of England as home. People here don't speak of their bungalows so. When they say so-and-so is at home, they always mean in England." She added: "I shall never get over my longing for English flowers and trees and fields and showers if I stayed in India all my life - which God forbid."

Forced on Henry by unfair dismissal, a new job took the couple, with a baby girl, to Zanzibar, more primitive and remote than Karachi. They had to keep their daughter indoors, because Arabs swooped on children, to be sold and brought up as slaves. Too narrow even for crinoline - as Elizabeth notes - the streets made even simple walking hazardous.

"You can have no idea of the destruction of clothes here," wrote Elizabeth. "I don't think a single day passes in which I don't tear dresses against these frightful doors etc, that have nails sticking out in all directions, and everybody does the same."

Fresh clothes from England were slow to arrive - a constant theme in Elizabeth's letters. But more painful was her disappointment that her parents continually put off a promised visit to Henry's family in Ireland. "Mind you go to Ireland," she wrote on one occasion. And when it didn't happen: "We are so disappointed you have put off your Irish visit. We do so want you to know our other parents."

A Lake District holiday by her parents finally brings the rebuke: "Isn't it too bad to go again to the Lakes when you could so easily have gone to Ireland instead. The reason I am so sorry is that it is likely to prevent very cordial intercourse afterwards. It is always difficult to forget that people left off getting to know one as long as they possibly could."

Just two years after Elizabeth emigrated, the family came to Thirsk where, within the next few years, Elizabeth gave birth to three more children. But by 1877, when their fifth and last child, Dorothea, was born, they had emigrated again - to Richmond, Virginia, in the USA.

Among letters from there is one in which Elizabeth expresses regrets that she can't return for her parents' golden wedding in 1889. Containing little of the lively detail that characterised her India correspondence, it ends rather formally: "I will close with my small share of the family congratulations wishing you every happiness and a most pleasant anniversary."

Introducing each letter with a neat summary, Yvonne Bird, who lives in Norfolk, has also pieced together a good deal of the family history, with photographs of the main members. In 1851, two cousins of Henry's founded what became the famous Jacobs biscuit company.

Sadly, there seems to have been no return to England for Henry and Elizabeth. A worry expressed by Henry that his work might take them to Cincinatti came to pass, for he died there in 1905, followed by Elizabeth in 1916. Dorothea, the last of their children to survive, died in 1931.

Time closed over their lives - until Yvonne Bird dusted of that bundle of old copperplate letters.

l A Quaker Family in India and Zanzibar 1863-1865, edited by Yvonne Bird, is published by Sessions of York, £12.95