Plain Tales from the Hills
1888
Kipling was twenty-two when he published these stories, and the precocious authority of his voice remains staggering. Plain Tales from the Hills captures British India with an insider's sharp eye and an outsider's uneasy conscience, the hill stations where empire is forgetting itself, the barracks where soldiers speak in a slang that crackles off the page. Here first appear Mrs. Hauksbee, the formidable Simla socialite, the policeman Strickland, and the immortal Soldiers Three. The collection exposes the fault lines of colonial life: an Englishman's casual betrayal of a hill girl who loved him, the comedy and tragedy of British officials adrift in their own pretensions. These are deceptively simple sketches, hence the title's pun on plain and hills, but they contain an entire world. Kipling's prose moves with the efficiency of a journalist who learned to make every sentence count. This is where modern short fiction began, and where a young writer announced himself as a voice impossible to ignore.
Editions
X-Ray
“A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty.””
— Rudyard Kipling
“Now India is a place beyond all others where one must not take things too seriously”
— Rudyard Kipling
“It takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out uncivilised Eastern instincts, such as falling in love at first sight.””
— Rudyard Kipling
“Every man is entitled to his own religious opinions; but no man – least of all a junior – has a right to thrust these down other men’s throats.””
— Rudyard Kipling
“Then says Mrs. Hauksbee to me – she looked a trifle faded and jaded in the lamplight: “Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.””
— Rudyard Kipling
“When a man does good work out of all proportion to his pay, in seven cases out of nine there is a woman at the back of the virtue. The two exceptions must have suffered from sunstroke.All kinds of magic are out of date and done away with, except in India, where nothing changes in spite of the shiny top-scum stuff that people call "civilization".””
— Rudyard Kipling
“If men had not this delusion as to the ultra-importance of their own particular employments, I suppose that they would sit down and kill themselves. But their weakness is wearisome, particularly when the listener knows that he himself commits exactly the same sin.””
— Rudyard Kipling
“No jury, we knew, could convict a man on the criminal count on native evidence in a land where you can buy a murder-charge, including the corpse, all complete for fifty-four rupees””
— Rudyard Kipling
“I explained as much as I knew of the seal-cutter’s way of jadoo; but her argument was much more simple: “The magic that is always demanding gifts is no true magic,” said she.””
— Rudyard Kipling
