Kipling Letters, III

BOOK REVIEWS Text is well done and appropriate for the paperback edition, directing the reader to the more detailed excellent explication in the Clarendon edition co-authored by Gatrell and Grindle. The edition's Bibliography as well as the bibliographic references cited by Nancy Barrineau in conjunction with her well-researched Explanatory Notes provide the reader with a carefully selected guide to Hardy. An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress and Other Stories includes the same excellent editorial commentary in its introduction and explanatory notes as that found in the Tess edition. In fact, this collection is as important (if not more so) for Dalziel's commentary as it is for Hardy's works. After all, it is comprised of stories which Hardy excluded from his complete works, sometimes for good reason. So for the general reader—one who has never read much Hardy—to go to this collection before reading any one of the other volumes in the series would be disappointing. The stories are generally lightweight, some because they are too brief to be substantial, others because they appear to have been dashed off hurriedly and, therefore, do not hold together as well as his better works. "'An Indiscretion' while charming is mainly significant," says Dalziel, because of "its pervasive indebtedness to Hardy's neverpublished first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady." For the student of Hardy, though, this collection provides thirty pages of detailed explanatory notes and an introduction with historical perspective on how the stories fit into the canon as a whole. Furthermore, its addition brings together all of Hardy's works within one series. Thus perhaps we have the first truly complete works of Thomas Hardy. Alice Patterson _____________ Salem College Kipling Letters, III The Letters of Rudyard Kipling: Volume 3, 1900-1910. Thomas Pinney, ed. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996. xii + 482 pp. $49.95 THIS EDITION of The Letters of Rudyard Kipling (two volumes have already appeared and more are projected) is only a selection from the very large number that Thomas Pinney has hunted out in public and private collections all over the world. It has been a monument of painstaking research: Pinney must have read more Kipling letters than anyone but Kipling himself. No complete edition is yet possible, since new material surfaces yearly in the salerooms. 199 ELT 40:2 1997 Pinney's organization of the volumes by decade makes an interesting point about Kipling's career. He has always been a difficult author to classify, belonging neither to the nineteenth century nor to the twentieth , since his life fell half in each. And of course he is not only a Victorian, for he continued writing through two more reigns. Kipling's life and work do indeed split broadly into decades. Schoolboy Lyrics was published in 1881,1890 the year he became famous. In 1900-1910 he was a friend of the rich and the great. The next decade brought the mass lunacy that climaxed in World War I and left mass depression behind it, as Kipling and so many others mourned their dead sons. The 1920s brought him "a miraculous hour of dawn returned to gild the sunset" ("The Bull that Thought," 1924), while in the 1930s twilight turned to night. Each of these periods in his fiction has a distinct flavour: the saucy know-all narrators in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), the powerful magic of The Jungle Books (1894), the subtleties of'"The^" (1904) and Rewards and Fairies (1910), the hatred in "Mary Postgate" (1915), literary accounts cast up in Debits and Credits (1926), elderly rumination on technique in "Proofs of Holy Writ" (1934). 1 January 1900 was the day after Kipling's thirty-fifth birthday. He marched into the new century with a charity campaign for British soldiers and their families, launched on the outbreak of the South African War: "the first time I ever set out of malice aforethought to sell my name for every blessed cent it would fetch," he wrote to Charles Eliot Norton. The huge publicity that resulted brought a backlash against him. As Jerome K. Jerome would write in the Sun on May 7, "Kipling day...