Rudyard Kipling · 1891 · exile

Kipling's first novel, written at twenty-six on a three-month deadline and drawn from his own unrequited love for Florence Garrard. Dick Heldar makes his name drawing the Sudan campaign for the London papers, takes a sword-cut to the head doing it, and goes slowly blind in a Chelsea studio while the woman he loves declines to notice.

1. 1
   Southsea

   Two orphans in a seaside boarding house under a woman Kipling drew from his own childhood - and a boy telling a girl he loves her, and being told she is leaving to finish her education, which sets the whole book.

2. 2
   Suakin

   Years on, Dick is a war artist with the British forces on the Red Sea coast during the Mahdist war - where he meets the correspondent Torpenhow, makes his reputation, and takes a sword-cut across the head.

3. 3
   London

   Back to a Chelsea studio and quick success, and then a specialist tells him the head wound is killing his optic nerve - and he starts the Melancolia against a clock, painting his masterpiece while he can still see it.

4. 4
   Paris

   Maisie is studying at the Academie Julian and does not want him, and Torpenhow goes over to fetch her when the blindness comes - and she looks at what he has become and goes back to her own work.

5. 5
   Port Said

   Blind and with the Melancolia destroyed by a model he had been unkind to, he takes ship for Egypt with an acquaintance's help - the fleshpits of Port Said, and a man arranging his own ending.

6. 6
   Suakin

   Put aboard an armoured train and taken up to the front he cannot see, he is shot through the head at dawn in Torpenhow's arms - which is the ending Kipling wrote second, and meant.