Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Rudyard Kipling
-
Standard Name: Kipling, Rudyard
Birth Name: Joseph Rudyard Kipling
An Indian-born English journalist, novelist, and travel writer, best-known for short stories, poetry, and children's books, RK
won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He never felt like a native in England although he spent most of his life there, lived in other countries as well, and never saw India after his mid-twenties. He was convinced of the moral mission of the British empire, seeing devoted heroism in its workers but pettiness and bureaucracy in its administration. He writes of India as an insider and his Indian writings were his best loved in England. His increasingly conservative politics seeped into his writing later in his career and lost him some of the immense, immediate public interest that his early work had garnered.
Lâl, composed in Aberdeenshire, was rejected by several minor periodicals (to which Richard Gillies Hardy
had suggested FAS
should send it) but accepted at first sight by Mowbray Morris
of Macmillan's Magazine (who...
Textual Production
Noel Streatfeild
NS
published The Fearless Treasure, A Story of England from Then to Now, which (contrary to her usual habit but like well-known books by E. Nesbit
and Rudyard Kipling
) carries present-day children back into history.
Wilson, Barbara Ker. Noel Streatfeild. Bodley Head, 1961.
27
Author summary
Rosemary Sutcliff
RS
, historical novelist, overcame disability to publish, over a span of forty years from 1950, more than fifty titles. Most are books for the young (billed for those of eleven and upwards, but having...
Education
Rosemary Sutcliff
Rosemary's mother was probably her most important teacher. She told her stories which, no matter how outlandish and fantastic, the very young Rosemary accepted as literal truth; she later imparted all kinds of varied information...
Literary responses
Rosemary Sutcliff
Margaret Meek
judged this to be, partly on account of the setting, the most Kiplingesque
of Sutcliff's books, as well as the best she had written by the early 1960s.
Meek, Margaret. Rosemary Sutcliff. The Bodley Head, 1962.
53, 57
The TLS review...
Family and Intimate relationships
Angela Thirkell
Stanley Baldwin
, later Prime Minister, and the poet and story-writer Rudyard Kipling
, were both cousins of AT
's mother. Kipling entered fully into the playing of a long-running English Civil War game with...
Literary responses
Angela Thirkell
She later observed that her poems for Josephine had no merit at all, being poor in thought and construction and largely borrowed from other sources. At this stage Rudyard Kipling
, too, was crushing about...
Education
James Tiptree Jr.
Alice Bradley was a great reader from childhood. Her early favourites were the Arabian Nights and Kipling
; then she discovered science-fiction magazines, with the help of her UncleHarry
and an issue of Weird...
Family and Intimate relationships
Iris Tree
Writer, critic, and caricaturist Sir Max Beerbohm
was IT
's half-uncle, the youngest son from Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's father's second marriage. Best remembered for his drawings and caricatures of the famous, Beerbohm also wrote...
Friends, Associates
Susan Tweedsmuir
ST
's parents made connections through friendship as remarkable as those made for them by family descent. Her mother was a friend of many writers and intellectuals of both sexes, including Marie Belloc Lowndes
,...
Education
Susan Tweedsmuir
She was, however, always reading as a child: she and her sister had few books, but knew by heart whole chapters of the ones they did have. As a child Susan hated Mrs Mortimer
's...
Textual Production
Michelene Wandor
Novels adapted by MW
are not restricted to those by women. Works by male writers she has revised for broadcasting include Kipps by H. G. Wells
, aired on Radio 4
in 1984 and runner-up...
