On the question of whether Kipling was aware of the sexual implication in
the last line of the story, a letter he wrote to the army doctor Sir
Almroth Wright (undated, but evidently sometime in 1916 or very early 1917)
has a relevant passage. He is talking about the emotional reasons for the
Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, and suggesting that the Irish were
frustrated by the state of war elsewhere when they themselves were under
'religious pressure' and had no conscription. (Yet he must have known how
many of them served in the Irish Guards). He comments: 'You can witness
much the same sort of nervous crisis among old maids in a household where
there has been a succession of marriages or funerals.' This does seem to
echo events in Mary Postgate, and 'marriages or funerals' ties the themes
of sex and death together.
Pinney's edition of the Letters, volume 4, transcribes it as 'among
the maids', but the owner of the letter very kindly sent me a xerox, and
the word is plainly 'old' not 'the'. Lisa Lewis
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