Kipling's Short Stories: Where to Start

Rudyard Kipling is one of the few classic authors whose reputation rests mainly on short fiction, yet a reader who wants to try him meets an awkward spread of options. There are stories for adults set among British officials and soldiers in India, animal stories read to children for more than a century, and comic origin tales written to be spoken aloud. They do not read alike, and a collection chosen at random can give a misleading first impression.

This guide takes four books available free from Project Gutenberg and suggests an order. It describes the openings, the kind of narrator you will meet, and what to pay attention to. It does not give away how any story ends, and it does not try to settle arguments about Kipling’s politics. It does state plainly, in one section, what a modern reader will encounter in the Indian stories.

First choice: Plain Tales from the Hills

The Gutenberg edition collects thirty-five stories, most of them only a few pages long, set in the hill station of Simla and the plains of British India in the 1880s.¹ The book opens with “Lispeth,” about the daughter of a Hill-man whose family turns Christian in a bad year, and from there moves among civil servants, subalterns, their wives, and the Indian servants and townspeople around them.

Why start here? The shortness of each piece lets you try Kipling’s voice without a large investment. The narrator is a confident young journalist who seems to know everyone and tells you what Simla thinks before telling you what happened. Each story carries a verse epigraph, and the gap between that verse and the brisk prose that follows is part of the effect.

Read the first five or six in order, then skip freely. The stories do not depend on one another, though names recur. If the gossipy manner begins to wear on you, look for the pieces in which the narrator stops being clever, such as “The Story of Muhammad Din,” which is short enough to read twice.

Second choice: The Man Who Would Be King

This single long story is available on Gutenberg both on its own and inside the collection The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories, where it sits alongside “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” and three other tales.² It begins with a narrator travelling by rail in the cheapest class on the road from Ajmir to Mhow, where he falls into conversation with a stranger who asks him to carry a message.

Why next? If Plain Tales showed you Kipling’s speed, this story shows what he does at length. Two loafers, Peachey Carnehan and Daniel Dravot, announce a plan to make themselves kings of Kafiristan, a region the narrator can only place roughly as the top corner of Afghanistan. The telling is in layers: the narrator meets the men, loses sight of them, and later hears the rest from one of them. Notice how the frame of a newspaper office at night, with the narrator waiting for the paper to go to press, controls when and how the story reaches you.

The ending is strong and much discussed, so avoid summaries before reading. The story includes violence described after the fact rather than shown.

Third choice: The Jungle Book

Published in 1894, The Jungle Book is seven stories, each followed by a song or chant.³ Three of them follow Mowgli, the child raised by wolves in the Seeonee hills; the others stand alone, including “The White Seal,” set in the Bering Sea, and “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” about a mongoose defending a bungalow garden from cobras.

Why third? Readers who know Mowgli only from films usually expect a continuous novel. The book is not that. The Mowgli stories jump years, and “Tiger! Tiger!” sends him among humans well before the end of the volume. Reading the two Indian collections first makes the Law of the Jungle easier to hear as Kipling’s own invention about rules and belonging, not just a children’s device.

The verses between stories are not padding. “Hunting-Song of the Seeonee Pack” and “Road-Song of the Bandar-Log” give voices to groups that the prose describes from outside. Read them aloud at least once.

Fourth choice: Just So Stories

Just So Stories was published in 1902 and contains twelve tales explaining how animals came by their features: how the whale got his throat, how the camel got his hump, how the leopard got his spots, and so on.⁴ The first words of the book address the listener as “O my Best Beloved,” and that address continues throughout.

Why last? The book is the most different in sound from the rest of Kipling. The sentences are built for the ear, with repeated phrases, invented compound words, and jokes that only work when spoken. Reading it silently after the Simla stories can feel like a drop in pressure. Reading it to someone, or at least mouthing the lines, restores it.

The Gutenberg text used here is a plain edition without Kipling’s own illustrations and captions, so if you have seen an illustrated copy, expect the stories alone.

Which collection first?

If you only read one, make it Plain Tales from the Hills. It is the book that made Kipling’s name, and the one that most directly shows how he handles a short form. Readers who prefer a longer adventure might also look at where to start with Robert Louis Stevenson, whose Kidnapped and Treasure Island share some of the same appetite for movement.

Colonial attitudes and language in the Indian stories

Plain Tales from the Hills and The Man Who Would Be King are written from inside the British administration of India and take its presence for granted. Indian characters are often seen through the eyes of officials or servants’ employers, and the narrator uses the word “native” as a routine category. Racial slurs appear in the dialogue of some stories, including in “The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows,” and the opening paragraph of The Man Who Would Be King sorts railway passengers by race as a matter of course. Christianity, caste, and “going native” are treated as subjects for irony or warning rather than for sympathy.

None of this is hidden or occasional, and some stories, such as “Lispeth” and “Beyond the Pale,” make the gap between the British and the people they ruled their actual subject. Readers can decide for themselves what the stories do with that gap. The point here is only that it is present from the first page. The Jungle Book also includes a story about army animals, “Her Majesty’s Servants,” framed by a parade for the Viceroy and an Afghan amir.

How to read these books

Each of the four is on Project Gutenberg with an EPUB download. Save the file, upload it to BlueReader, and after a short server processing step the book opens from your bookshelf and keeps your place across devices.⁵ For The Man Who Would Be King, the collection with five stories gives you more for one upload than the standalone edition.

Short collections suit this kind of reading. One story from Plain Tales fits a commute, and a Mowgli story with its song fits an evening. For other collections of short fiction that work well as a first step into older English prose, see classic short stories for beginners.