Kipling Rudyard

1906 · ref. 010576 — Doubleday Page New York 1906 1906. 1st Edition 1st Printing. Hardcover. Very Good/No Jacket. 1st American edition 1st printing ; 80 leaves : col. ill. ; 22 cm. LCCN 06036631 OCLC 1310933 LC PR4854 .T35 1906 ; worn decorative embossed pale sea-green cloth with color paste down panel and lettering in gold ; no dustjacket ; top edge gilt ; title page in red and black with frontispiece tissue ; name on front endpaper ; "It was a bold venture to illustrate this most spirituelle and elusive of Mr. Kipling's writings but the artist Mr. Townsend has not failed.The children are there they are real children and not real children in the pictures as in the sketch. They evade you peep from behind trees skirmish about with sweet gaiety and yet elude you. they are there and not there. This is one of their rooms is very charming and so is that of the children on the stairs. But who could illustrate They Ans indeed who could write They by Mr. Rudyard Kipling and he only at a moment perhaps when the gates of the spirit worlf had been opened and he had seen a little one go in--to come again Ah that is the question! Of this we are sure we can bear no logical or curious treatment of this most tender question. All we can endure is some such light delicate elusive treatment as we find in They."--The Parents' Review - Volume 17 1906 ; "They" by Rudyard Kipling is a poignant supernatural short story. First published in Scribner's Magazine for August 1904 and collected in Traffics and Discoveries the same year. Then published in book form as a separate illustrated edition by Macmillan and Co. in 1905 featuring color illustrations by F. H. Townsend. This is the first American edition published by Doubleday Page and Co in 1906. A motorist driving through the English countryside in Sussex discovers a mysterious beautiful old house cared for by a blind woman. The estate is inhabited by the spirits of children who have died. They are invisible to the blind woman who senses them spiritually and only partially seen or heard by the narrator. The tale reflects Kipling's deep personal sorrow and grief following the death of his beloved six-year-old daughter Josephine in 1899. Explores a parent's yearning to connect with a child who has passed away. Portrays a gentle liminal space or "limbo" where departed children stay connected to love before moving on. Uses the blind woman as a symbol that true understanding and perception transcend physical eyesight. ; Kipling has again used the device of "the imperfectly informed narrator" to describe the events he witnesses without fully understanding them although the other characters in the story do as does the reader who follows the clues that are offered. All becomes clear to the narrator in the end. --John McGivering and John Radcliffe The Kipling Society ; ".one of the most moving of Kipling's stories and one of the very few with a clear autobiographical impulse . The first visit suggests the entry into a fairy-tale its highly wrought beauty owing something to Kipling's Pre-Raphaelite background "--Philip Mallett ; This strange haunting story of the limbo of lost children not yet ready to feel at home in Heaven harking back for a space to the earth and the life they knew there is among the earliest of Kipling's "difficult" stories of his middle and late periods which critics are never tired of dissecting and explaining. Like all Kipling's higher allegory it loses much by any detailed attempt at explanation. All that we need is for the sense of the strange and the uncanny of the achieving of the relief of sorrow by forbidden means that are at last realized as forbidden and put away to grow on us as they grow on the narrator who on this one occasion we cannot but accept as Kipling himself until the heart-breaking moment of climax; the acceptance of grief that leads to peace.--Lancelyn Green ; Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist novelist poet and short-story write Frederick Henry Townsend 1868-1920 was the first Art Editor of Punch Magazine. ; VG Doubleday, Page, New York, 1906 hardcover