A Circle of Sisters by Judith Flanders

Author:Judith Flanders
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141935256
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2006-12-17T05:00:00+00:00

The mother’s care and … attentions have completely demoralized me and … I have decided that when I marry it must be a lady well versed in domestic knowledge, not less than twelve years my senior, and by preference, some other man’s wife. Thus only can I hope to pass gracefully from the comforts of the foursquare hearth to the comforts of my own. 42

In turn his parents wanted to make up for the childhood that he and they had missed: two years after Rudyard had first begun working, his father called his salary ‘that boy’s pocket money’.43

In 1884, when Rudyard had first been offered a promotion to working for the Pioneer in Allahabad, his primary concern had been how to manage on his own, without his family square. He had never lived alone, never looked after himself. There were of course many men in India who ‘shifted for themselves’, in the phrase of the time, but they were more to be pitied than imitated. His chaste passion for Mrs Edmonia (‘Ted’) Hill, seven years older than he and the wife of meteorologist Professor Alexander Hill, and his lack of interest in any more suitable women, meant that marriage, the obvious solution to his housekeeping dilemma, was not immediately a possibility. The next possibility was to look for one of those ‘superfluous’ women to take care of him. Aunt Edie was the family member who fitted that description, and now that Louie was so much better, and with Stan at university, she could probably be spared. Rudyard wrote to her:

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