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.
Before attending school and after she left, Doris educated herself by reading. Her parents possessed copies of the classics, like Scott
, Dickens
, and Kipling
. She read widely in the nineteenth century—her favourites...
Education
Ruth Padel
RP
says the earliest book she can remember was Kipling
's Jungle Book (which she learned by heart, along with many poems about animals).
Taught by governesses until she was thirteen, Margaret Haig Thomas learned to read at about five. She was taught German and French, and she also learned Welsh as a child but did not retain it...
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...
Education
Gwen Moffat
When as a child she longed for travel and wild places, she said, Kipling
and Ella Maillart
became my gods.
Moffat, Gwen. Space Below My Feet. Houghton Mifflin, Riverside Press.
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...
Education
Maya Angelou
Marguerite Johnson had already become a voracious reader, both of Black writers and of canonical dead white males. Shakespeare
, she wrote later, was my first white love.
Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Heinemann New Windmill Series.
12
She also enjoyed and respected...
Education
Diana Athill
DA
was taught at home by governesses (seven successively before she was sent to school), who followed a correspondence course designed for home schooling which was known as Parents Educational National Union
. A French...
Dedications
Louisa Baldwin
The original edition of nine stories was illustrated by J. Ayton Symington
.
EN
's collaborations with Oswald Barron
began with The Life-Lamp, which appeared in Atalanta in June 1893. They collaborated again in several genres: in A Family Novelette (a farce performed in a public hall...
Anthologization
Enid Blyton
It was perhaps EB
's high point as a poet when she had five pieces included in an anthology that also featured work by John Masefield
, Walter de la Mare
, and Rudyard Kipling
.
Stoney, Barbara. Enid Blyton. Hodder and Stoughton.
