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.
Here, as in Edinburgh, she entered energetically into local literary life. She was the first president (for two terms) of the North Gloucestershire (Cheltenham) Centre of Poetry
, and during the second world war...
Leisure and Society
Eliza Lynn Linton
She enjoyed going to and hosting prominent literary and social receptions. Her guests included a wide range of people: popular writers such as Rudyard Kipling
, Marie Corelli
, and Frank Harris
; luminaries of...
Literary responses
Menella Bute Smedley
The small Rudyard Kipling
, at a miserable time in his young life, was stirred and enchanted by this book and one of its sequels, Child-Nature, even though he later remembered neither the authors'...
Literary responses
Jane Gardam
The TLS reviewer, Ruth Scurr
, used as yardstick for this novel Kipling
's writings about his parallel childhood trauma and experience of evil (related in the story Baa Baa Black Sheep).
Archer, William. Poets of the Younger Generation. John Lane, Bodley Head.
vii-viii
Her diction is pure, he...
Literary responses
Elinor Glyn
This novella led to the widespread use of the term It: Whether you had It or not became the burning question of the day.
Etherington-Smith, Meredith, and Jeremy Pilcher. The "It" Girls. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
240
It also did much to re-establish EG
's reputation...
Literary responses
E. Nesbit
Rudyard Kipling
wrote to EN
in amusing detail about his kiddies' delight in the version published in the Strand.
Briggs, Julia. A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858-1924. Hutchinson.
254-5
Literary responses
E. Nesbit
Again Kipling
wrote comically about the effect of her work in his household: how the governess had to read it aloud again and again, and his wife just all the time, and himself too, but...
Literary responses
Flora Annie Steel
The Spectator review found this volume to be marked by appreciation of the oriental standpoint, both ethical and religious.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
156
Julie English Early
in the Dictionary of Literary Biography suggests that this may be a...
Literary responses
Flora Annie Steel
Among the chorus of praise which greeted this novel, FAS
most cherished a letter from a man whose wife had died in the Mutiny, telling her that her work had enabled, him, at last, to...
Literary responses
Martin Ross
The Spectator gave the book a noble review.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber.
166
Rudyard Kipling
responded to it by sending his respectful love, his obeisances and his salaams.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber.
166
The Times had excerpts reprinted for distribution to troops in...
Literary responses
Ethel M. Dell
She judged that EMD
dealt honestly with human feelings, with the problems of the heart and the conscience. Nor was it, she insisted, absurd to compare her with Euripides
or Shakespeare
; in an image...
Literary responses
Flora Annie Steel
An early study of FAS
's writings was A Star of India by Daya Patwardhan
, complete with a bibliographical list of her works and investigation of her real-life sources.
Powell, Violet. Flora Annie Steel: Novelist of India. Heinemann.
69
Violet Powell, who admires...
Literary responses
Ethel M. Dell
Edward John Thompson
in The Other Side of the Medal, 1925, blamed EMD
's writings (along with those of Kipling
and Maud Oliver
) for spreading misconceptions about life in India.
Dell, Penelope. Nettie and Sissie. Hamish Hamilton.
69
Her works...
Literary responses
Ruth Pitter
Belloc
's preface quotes a passage from RP
and compares it with lines by Rudyard Kipling
and by Edith Sitwell
to argue Pitter's superiority to either of these distinguished poets in the classical spirit.