SOURCE: Stinton, T. C. W. “What Happened in ‘Mrs. Bathhurst’?” Essays in Criticism 38, no. 1 (January 1988): 55-74.

In the following essay, Stinton finds thematic similarities between the story “Mrs. Bathurst” and several other Kipling tales and explores the story's discontinuous narrative.

To use one work of an author to illuminate another is always hazardous. Each work starts from different premises to reach different conclusions. So it is an error to use Sophocles' Oedipus Coloneus to illuminate his Oedipus Tyrannus, and vice versa. With Kipling it is even more hazardous, since he said himself that it was his policy to avoid repetition, and clearly implied this in ‘The Bull that Thought’: ‘no artist can be expected to repeat himself’.¹ Nonetheless, he did often treat the same theme more than once, not only in a general way, such as the themes of laughter or revenge which occur throughout his works, but...