Lispeth
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"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.
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."[1] An anonymous article published in The Youth's Companion in 1924 also hints at this: “Rudyard Kipling was so seldom in Simla that I have always felt convinced that his sister helped him a great deal in the ground work of his tales and ditties; she had a more intimate knowledge than he of Simla and its society."[2]
Plot summary
The story is set in Kotgarh, a valley about 55 miles (89 km) by road from Simla, the "summer seat of the British Government of India". It is the home of Sonoo and his wife Jadeh, who, after the maize fails and bears raid their opium poppy field, turn Christian. Their daughter is Elizabeth, or 'Lispeth' in "the Hill or Pahari pronunciation."[3] Cholera kills Sonoo and Jadeh, and Lispeth becomes servant/companion to the Chaplain's wife at Kotgarh. She grows very lovely, "a stately goddess, five feet ten in her shoes."[3] One day on her walk ( "little constitutionals...between Kotgarth and Narkunda" consisting between 20–30 miles (32–48 km) says Kipling, with fine irony and huge admiration of the hill people) she finds an unconscious Englishman whom she carries back to the Mission, announcing that she has found her husband.[3] This scandalises the Chaplain and his wife, and they "lectured her severely on the impropriety of her conduct."[3]
The stranger, a traveler hunting plants and butterflies, recovers. He enjoys flirting with Lispeth, although he is engaged to an English "girl at Home."[3] When he decides to leave Kotgarh to return to England, the Chaplain's wife advises the Englishman to tell Lispeth that he will marry her. Of course, the Englishman does not return, and after three months of Lispeth's waiting and weeping, the Chaplain's wife tells her the truth, saying "it was 'wrong and improper' of Lispeth to think of marriage with an Englishman, who was of a superior clay..."[3] Upon learning that she has been deceived by the Englishman and the Chaplain's wife, Lispeth returns to live among her own people, marrying a wood-cutter "who beat her after the manner of paharis." In response to Lispeth's rejection of Christianity the Chaplain's wife concludes: "'There is no law whereby you can account for the vagaries of the heathen...and I believe that Lispeth was always at heart an infidel.”[3] At this point in the story the 'native' is shown as honest, simple and admirable, and it is the Christians who are the hypocrites and liars. It is not quite as simple as that: Kipling also suggests that he has heard this story from Lispeth herself, who "when she was sufficiently drunk, could sometimes be induced to tell the story of her first love-affair" - which may seem a rather patronising European attitude to 'the natives.'[3]
