Sutcliff, Rosemary - Hilary Wright

HILARY WRIGHT

It can hardly have been by chance that in 1960 it was Rosemary Sutcliff who wrote the Bodley Head monograph on the children's books of Rudyard Kipling, nor is it surprising that in it she remarked " … of all the writers of my childhood, he made the strongest impact on me, an impact which I have never forgotten,"… for no reader of her own books—except one totally ignorant of Kipling—can fail to be aware of her debt to him. Quite apart from certain identities of subject, there is an underlying identity of theme: what one might call the Conflict of Duty and Inclination. In the monograph she wrote that the Mowgli stories are " … a following-out of divided life and divided loyalties, the unbearable choice that has to be made and has to be borne" …; this might equally well be said of her own works, since she has scarcely a hero who does not have to make that "unbearable choice," with the making of and abiding by that choice very often the...

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