Sandra Kemp Books

Published in 1926 Debits and Credits, a book of short stories that expands some of the material collected in writing The Irish Guards in The Great War, as well as resuming some topics of earlier Kipling stories; fables, animals, English history, and Stalky & Co's views on education. The final story, "The Gardener", has been classed with "Mary Postgate" as of particular interest to feminists and to students of English society during World War I, while its ambiguous narrative also makes it interesting to students of modernism.

'I am only just returned to a sense of the real world about me, for I have been reading Villette, a still more wonderful book than Jane Eyre.' George Eliot Lucy Snowe, in flight from an unhappy past, leaves England and finds work as a teacher in Madame Beck's school in 'Villette'. Strongly drawn to the fiery autocratic schoolmaster Monsieur Paul Emanuel, Lucy is compelled by Madame Beck's jealous interference to assert her right to love and be loved. Based in part on Charlotte Bronte's experience in Brussels ten years earlier, Villette (1853) is a cogent and dramatic exploration of a woman's response to the challenge of a constricting social environment. Its deployment of imagery comparable in power to that of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and its use of comedy-ironic or exuberant-in the service of an ultimately sombre vision, make Villette especially appealing to the modern reader.