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.
The title derives from the refrain to Kipling
's The Ladies: An' I learned about women from 'er!
Kipling, Rudyard. Collected Verse of Rudyard Kipling. Hodder and Stoughton.
408
Leisure and Society
Lady Margaret Sackville
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Margaret Sackville
In some poems she writes as one of the mothers who have lost their sons; in another as an anonymous watching eye in a silent village where dead bodies lie in the street after it...
Literary responses
Evelyn Sharp
Beverly Lyon Clark
, who wrote an introduction to this book and thought extremely highly of it, argued that the neglect of it stemmed from its belonging not just to one but to several under-appreciated...
Textual Features
Constance Smedley
This contains eight stories reminiscent in their titles of Rudyard Kipling
's Just So Stories: How the Horse Looked Ahead, How the Swallows Learned the Song, and so on. In the latter...
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'...
FS
's title flatly contradicts Kipling
's assertion in The Ballad of East and West: Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Oxford University Press.
294
In her introduction she...
Textual Production
Flora Annie Steel
Commentators are agreed on the astonishing range and scope of FAS
's brief stories. Daya Patwardhan
, her first major critic, wrote that they present almost all the types of the teeming millions.
Steel, Flora Annie. “Introduction”. The Best Short Stories of Flora Annie Steel, edited by Saros Cowasjee et al., Indus, p. i - xvi.
vii
To...
Textual Production
Flora Annie Steel
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...
Reception
Flora Annie Steel
Another story here, Harvest, about changes in the land laws of the Punjab which FAS
disapproved, was called by a reviewer either by Kipling
or Diabolus.
Powell, Violet. Flora Annie Steel: Novelist of India. Heinemann.
71
Diabolus is Latin for the devil...
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
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...
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.