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 varied influences on AWE
's passion for folk and fairy tales include her uncle Henry Strachey
, Rudyard Kipling
, and Maxim Gorky
.
Williams-Ellis, Amabel. All Stracheys Are Cousins. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983.
6
In her memoir she comments that, since World War...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
The story is told in first-person by an austere seventy-year-old woman who has withdrawn from life since she suffered bereavement during the First World War.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...
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...
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...
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, 1987.
254-5
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, 1986.
240
It also did much to re-establish EG
's reputation...
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
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
Juliana Horatia Ewing
She was reciprocally admired by Ruskin
in the nineteenth century, and admired also by Kipling
in the twentieth. Critic Mary Lascelles
lamented at the centenary of JHE
's death that her books had been allowed...
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...
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...
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...
Literary responses
Martin Ross
The Spectator gave the book a noble review.
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber, 1968.
166
Rudyard Kipling
responded to it by sending his respectful love, his obeisances and his salaams.
qtd. in
Collis, Maurice. Somerville and Ross: A Biography. Faber and Faber, 1968.
166
The Times had excerpts reprinted for distribution to troops in...
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 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, 1990.
The central character, a harried female writer, comes...
