 Starke grew up in India and used it as a background for her plays "The Sword of Peace" and "The Widow of Malabar".Starke then lived in Italy for an extended period, between 1792 and 1798, to attend a sick relation, and this experience formed the basis for her later writing.After the end of the Napoleonic Wars Starke returned to Italy and devoted the rest of her life to continual revisions of her travel series, in so doing effectively reinventing the genre.