Rudyard Kipling’s Vermont years: writing The Jungle Book at Naulakha
Photo: Lou Sander, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1892, Rudyard Kipling, already famous at 26, married Caroline Balestier, an American whose family had property near Brattleboro. The couple settled there, and Kipling built a long, narrow, shingled house on a hillside in Dummerston with a view across the Connecticut River valley to Mount Monadnock. He named it Naulakha, after a novel he had co-written with Caroline’s brother, Wolcott.
The Jungle Book
The Vermont years were among Kipling’s most productive. At Naulakha he wrote “The Jungle Book” and “The Second Jungle Book,” much of “Captains Courageous” and many of the poems later collected in “The Seven Seas.” Two of his children were born in Brattleboro. He enjoyed snowshoeing and is said to have played golf in the snow with painted balls.
The feud
The idyll ended badly. Kipling fell out with Caroline’s brother Beatty Balestier, a hard-drinking farmer who lived nearby, over money and land. In 1896 Beatty threatened him on the road, and Kipling had him arrested. The resulting court hearing in Brattleboro drew national press, and Kipling was humiliated. The family left for England that summer and never lived in Vermont again.
Kipling won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 and died in 1936.
Naulakha today
The house was bought in 1992 by the Landmark Trust, a British preservation charity, which restored it and rents it to guests by the night, with much of Kipling’s furniture still in place. It is a National Historic Landmark. Kipling’s own desk is there, facing the window he looked out of while writing about Mowgli.
