As he described in the novel, "There was no mistaking. He was well on his way to literary success, but for literary London short stories were the precursor to a novel, and so he began to write The Light that Failed while he was living it. His "Raj" stories had preceded him and he began to publish poems about Danny Deever and Gunga Din which were to establish him as the major force in British writing. Kipling had come back to London after seven years in India.
He met her again in 1890 during some lonely wandering on the Thames embankment. They corresponded over the first two years he was away, but she was a poor letter writer, had no real interest in him and, as his distraught letters to other family members show, she terminated the relationship. Kipling and Flo maintained a relationship and by 1882 when he left for India to begin his career as a reporter, he believed himself engaged to her. A gift of natural refinement stood in the place of religion and of home training." Trix called her "a curious blend of simplicity and sophistication, wisdom and ignorance. Her family owned the jeweller Garrard and Co.
She had a maddeningly elusive, self-centred manner, smoked cigarettes and was careless of her appearance. Kipling was smitten on sight with a love that would last 11 years and inform his attitude to women for the rest of his life.įlo was about a year older than Kipling but much more sophisticated, having been brought up in continental hotels. She was a slender girl with pre-Raphaelite looks, pale skin, long dark hair, large grey eyes and a boyish figure. When Kipling and his sister Trix were aged five and two respectively, they had been sent from India to board with a Southsea landlady so that they could have an English upbringing and avoid the social fate of "going native" which would have befallen them if they had stayed with their parents in India.
The spark that ignited it was the reappearance in Kipling's life of his first love, Flo Garrard, and her crippling second rejection of him. The result was The Light that Failed, a richly revealing, semi-autobiographical novel, which, though badly reviewed, has stayed in print for more than 100 years. He worked to an exacting deadline of three months as he grappled with the most complex problem of his literary life. In 1890, Rudyard Kipling was living in two rented rooms above a sausage shop in Villiers Street, next to Charing Cross station, when he was commissioned to write a novel for Lippincott's Magazine.
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