"How the Just So Stories Were Made" by John Batchelor

How the Just So Stories Were Made The Brilliance and Tragedy Behind Kipling’s Celebrated Tales for Little Children John Batchelor

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Format:: Hardback
Publication date:: 13 Apr 2021
ISBN:: 9780300237184
Imprint:: Yale University Press
Dimensions:: 224 pages: 235 x 156mm
Illustrations:: 34 b-w illus.

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From "How the Leopard Got Its Spots" to "The Elephant’s Child," Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories have delighted readers across the world for more than a century. In this original study, John Batchelor explores the artistry with which Kipling created the Just So Stories, using each tale as an entry point into the writer’s life and work—including the tragedy that shadows much of the volume, the death of his daughter Josephine.

Batchelor details the playful challenges the stories made to contemporary society. In his stories Kipling played with biblical and other stories of creation and imagined fantastical tales of animals' development and man's discovery of literacy.

Richly illustrated with original drawings and family photographs, this account reveals Kipling’s public and private lives—and sheds new light on a much-loved and tremendously influential classic.

Formerly a Fellow of New College, Oxford, John Batchelor is an emeritus professor of Newcastle University. His previous books include The Edwardian Novelists and biographies of Joseph Conrad, John Ruskin, Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, and the great Victorian Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson.