The Kiplings and India: A Collection of Writings from British India, 1870-1900

Alice Kipling Fleming (Beatrice Kipling)

Alice Kipling Fleming (1868-1948), who sometimes published as Beatrice Kipling and who was known by her family as "Trix," is the daughter of Lockwood Kipling and Alice MacDonald Kipling and sister of Rudyard Kipling. (We will refer to her as "Fleming" -- one of the names she used while publishing -- on this site.) Along with her more famous brother, Fleming wrote poems and short stories connected to Anglo-Indian life. She was educated for several years in England, though she didn't suffer the same acute distress Rudyard felt due to separation from family. Alice returned to India in 1883, and began collaborating with Rudyard on early projects such as Echoes (1884), Quartette (1885), and Plain Tales from the Hills (1886-7). She married Jack Fleming in 1889, and published her first novel The Heart of a Maid, under the name Beatrice Grange, in 1890, on the same "Railway Series" that published so many early Rudyard Kipling stories between 1887 and 1890. (In subsequent editions of The Heart of a Maid, her name would sometimes be given as "Beatrice Kipling.") In 1897, Fleming published a second novel, A Pinchbeck Goddess, under the name "Mrs. J.M. Fleming"; this novel was an expanded version of a short story Fleming originally published in the Civil & Military Gazette under the "Plain Tales From the Hills" header. In 1901, Alice collaborated with her mother to produce a volume of poetry, Hand in Hand: Verses by a Mother and a Daughter.

According to biographers, in her later life Fleming grew intensely interested in the occult. She is also thought to have had a series of episodes that biographers have interpreted as schizophrenia, including one episode that preceded the publication of A Pinchbeck Goddess. 

Writings by Alice Kipling on this Site:

Echoes (1884; collaborative volume produced with Rudyard Kipling)

Quartette (1885; collaborative volume with a single short story, "The Haunted Cabin," contributed by Alice Kipling)

Plain Tales From the Hills (1886-7; short stories first published in the Civil & Military Gazette without attribution; most are by Rudyard Kipling, but several, including "Love-In-a-Mist", "How it Happened", and an early version of "A Pinchbeck Goddess," are almost certainly written by Alice Kipling)

"The Little Pink House" (Pall Mall Gazette, August 1894)

Forthcoming in the near future: 

The Heart of a Maid (1891)

A Pinchbeck Goddess (novel published in 1897)
 

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