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.
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
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.
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
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.
53, 57
The TLS review...
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
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
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
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...
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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mildred Cable
The first three chapters are devoted to each individual woman, while the fourth describes their coming together into a three-fold cord, which could not easily be broken.
Cable, Mildred, and Francesca French. Something Happened. Hodder and Stoughton.
110
This image refers to a passage in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jennifer Johnston
The title is quoted from Kipling
's Recessional, a poem about the end of empire.