Lispeth
"Lispeth" is a short story by Rudyard Kipling. It was first published in the Civil and Military Gazette on 29 November 1886; its first appearance in book form was in the first Indian edition of Plain Tales from the Hills in 1888, and it later appeared in subsequent editions of that collection. The tale is an interesting example of Kipling's attitudes to different races and cultures, which is less simple than many accounts of his beliefs allow. Authorship Rudyard's sister Alice "Trix" Kipling may have been involved in the writing of some of the stories in Plain Tales from the Hills, including "Lispeth": "As is widely acknowledged by Kipling scholars, Alice was a prime contributor to previous Kipling collection, among them Echoes (1884) and Quartette (1885)...In "Trix—The Other Kipling" (Kipling Journal, September 2014), Barbara Fisher...speculates that signs of Trix’s sensibility can be found in 'Lispeth', 'Three– and an Extra', 'Miss Youghal’s Sais', 'Bitters Neat', 'Yoked to an Unbeliever', 'False Dawn' and 'Cupid’s Arrow[sic]" (48). In all of these stories, Fisher locates central narrative strands concerning unrequited love, unhappy marriages, star-crossed lovers, and unhappy maidens—themes, as noted above, that concerned the eighteen-year old Alice more as they concerned Rudyard less." An