‘We would rather eat our cake than merely have it’

Rosemary Hill

  • A Circle of Sisters: Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Baldwin by Judith Flanders
    Penguin, 392 pp, £17.99, September 2001, ISBN 0 670 88673 4
  • The Hated Wife: Carrie Kipling 1862-1939 by Adam Nicolson
    Short Books, 96 pp, £4.99, May 2001, ISBN 0 571 20835 5
  • Victorian Diaries: The Daily Lives of Victorian Men and Women edited by Heather Creaton
    Mitchell Beazley, 144 pp, £14.99, February 2001, ISBN 1 84000 359 6

Frank Doubleday, the American publisher and friend of Rudyard and Carrie Kipling, once arrived at their house in Sussex to find Rudyard in a sweat in front of the hall fireplace shovelling a pile of his manuscripts into the flames. It was a horrifying sight, especially to a publisher. ‘For heaven’s sake, Rud, what are you doing?’ Doubleday asked. To which the answer came: ‘I was looking over old papers and I got thinking. No one’s going to make a monkey out of me after I die.’ But Kipling has been more caricatured in popular memory than most.

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