By contrast, Carrie Kipling has had a bad press, which I don’t think she deserves. Only Adam Nicolson’s little book about her, The Hated Wife, makes some amends and shows how she carried Kipling through and what a lot she had to put up with. Most biographers have preferred to ignore Carrie as far as possible and instead sought to ferret out a homosexual or at least homoerotic streak in Kipling, especially in his relationship with Carrie’s brother Wolcott Balestier: the principal evidence being the brutal speed of Ruddy and Carrie’s marriage after Wolcott’s death, and the fact that he changed ‘Dear Lad’ to ‘Dear Lass’ in his poem ‘The Long Trail’. The latter strikes me as no more than the artist’s economy of effort shown by Elton John in substituting ‘England’s Rose’ for ‘Norma Jean’. The wedding was indeed a weird and brisk affair. According to Edmund Gosse, one of the four men who attended the ceremony at All Souls, Langham Place (Alice and Trix were both down with the flu), it was as if Ruddy had been hurried into matrimony, like a rabbit into its hole. At 2.8 the cortège entered the church and at 2.20 left it. Both bridegroom and bride are possessed by a very devil of secrecy.

Henry James, who was giving the bride away, described her as ‘a hard devoted little person whom I don’t in the least understand his marrying’ — and nor one feels can Charles Allen.

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