The Hated Wife: Carrie Kipling 1862-1939

Adam Nicolson's 2001 THE HATED WIFE: CARRIE KIPLING 1862 - 1939 is, I believe, the first "Short Book" that I have ever read. The publisher is Short Books, 15 Highway Terrace, London N5 1UP. *** The paperback book is indeed "short," a mere 96 pages. THE HATED WIFE draws heavily on Caroline Kipling's diary. It is not, I think, a book for persons only vaguely interested in or barely informed about 1905 Nobel Prize winner Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936). THE HATED WIFE is about Rudyard's wife Caroline Starr Balestier, three years Rudyard's senior, who married the rising literary star when he was 24. Henry James gave the bride away in a small London wedding. *** Why is this book not for everyone? Mainly because it presupposes that you are fairly knowledgeable already about Rudyard Kipling, his times, his parents and sister Trix and his marriage and children. Not once, to my recollection, does author Adam Nicolson's narrative give Carrie's Christian name of Caroline, though he does once reproduce that name as her regular signature. The author assumes that readers are already fiercely prejudiced against Carrie Kipling, regarding her as a friendless, dominating, somehow limiting force on her husband's great genius. Now I, for one, have read a dozen books or so about the Kiplings. And never elsewhere have I seen her called with no little venom "the hated wife." I fear that Nicolson has created a strawman in order to knock it down. *** That said, Nicolson, as do other lengthier biographers, records the concerns of Rudyard's parents and of Henry James about the romance and marriage. In the hands of Carrie, mama Kipling's Ruddy becomes simply Rud. Nicolson argues that whenever possible during their marriage, Rud would dash off alone to be with men in London. If so, it is remarkable how many letters, sometimes two or three daily, the author wrote to his wife on such occasions. ***Nicolson argues that Rudyard Kipling liked his women older and masculine, dominating and capable. He argues as well that after her wedding Carrie let herself go, gained weight, dressed dowdily and lost any original sexual appeal to her husband. He gives her credit for stiffening Rud's spine at times of crisis, but also sharing his cowardly inclination to assign unhappy experiences to oblivion and never speak of them again -- e.g., the death of their young daughter. -OOO-