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.
PF
published a novel which takes its title from a poem by Kipling
: Road Through the Woods.
Kipling
titled his poem The Way Through the Wood, but in its first line the...
Textual Production
Pamela Frankau
PF
published a novel, Slaves of the Lamp, which follows its characters through that period of their lives which ends in the Second World War; a sequel, Over the Mountains, 1967, ends at...
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).
The story is told in first-person by an austere seventy-year-old woman who has withdrawn from life since she suffered bereavement during the First World War. A young, illegitimate relative startles her into a new life...
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...
Textual Features
Clotilde Graves
In the novel itself the dedication's style is somewhat modified by narration and dialogue. Set largely during the siege of Mafeking in the Boer War (which began in October 1899), this highly coloured and broadly...
Textual Features
Beatrice Harraden
They mention the need for new funds and the way they will supplement previous subscriptions.
Harraden, Beatrice, and Elizabeth Robins. “The Sussex Hospital”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 934, p. 750.
750
They specify some of the material they have already collected from other authors and publishers to sell on...
Intertextuality and Influence
Patricia Highsmith
In these tales, animals affected by human callousness and cruelty carry out some startling acts of reprisal. As PH
herself puts it, animals get the better of their masters or owners, because the latter merit...
Family and Intimate relationships
Laurence Hope
LH
's father, Arthur Cory
, was (like his wife) the English-born child of a barrister. He settled in India and became a military officer, first with the Bengal Staff Corps
as a major, and...
Friends, Associates
Laurence Hope
Both the Nicolsons enjoyed the company of Violet Jacob
, whose recollections of LH
often tend towards the comical. Dining with Hope in 1898, Jacobs reported: Her wits were at their best. Afterwards she walked...
Textual Production
Laurence Hope
LH
began writing poetry during her adolescence: sources differ as to how much of her juvenile writing she destroyed, although enough remained for the posthumous publication of Laurence Hope's Poems in 1907. Noting certain biographical...
Textual Production
Elspeth Huxley
Nicholls
feels that Norah Smallwood
missed a trick by failing to jump at the chance when EH
first suggested a sequel to The Flame Trees of Thika, which she did when delivering the first...
Textual Production
Naomi Jacob
Under her pseudonym of Ellington Gray, NJ
published a novel entitled Saffroned Bridesails, a phrase which she found in a poem by Kipling
.
Jacob, Naomi. Me: A Chronicle about Other People. Hutchinson.
240-1
Textual Production
Naomi Jacob
She wrote to Kipling
to enquire the meaning of the words and he reproved her for using them without understanding them.
Jacob, Naomi. Me: A Chronicle about Other People. Hutchinson.
240-1
Literary responses
Sarah Orne Jewett
The Feminist Companion describes the novel as her masterpiece; realistic in style and innovative in form, it pursues the matriarchal theme explored in much of her work.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
The central character, a harried female writer, comes...