Sidney Kilner Levett-Yeats - Later Life

Later Life

Unlike Kipling, who stayed with the characters and literary topography he mined in India, Levett-Yeats was driven by temperament or the demands of readers and the marketplace to stray further afield. He returned to England, where he lived as a successful, although mostly critically ignored, commercial novelist. Unlike Kipling, Levett-Yeats seemed more interested in rewards of the pocketbook rather than paeans from the critics, and by that measure, at least, he seems to have been a success.

In his retelling of medieval legends that echoed King Arthur, Levett-Yeats provided a window into the British colonial mind at the end of the nineteenth century. Some scholars now suggest that Levett-Yeats' tales of chivalric derring-do mask a deeper insecurity about the English mandate in India. Underlying the romance of Levett-Yeats' tales, they suggest, is a darker world view, tinctured by the challenges to British authority in the Punjab after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which demonstrated how tenuous the East India Company's hold was on an enormous nation. Levett-Yeats anachronistic tales of distressed damsels and heroic knights might have been the tonic England needed at the time.

In 1906 he married a lady named Mildred Eagles, and after this date, he does not appear to have published anything. He was awarded the Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire (C.I.E.) in recognition of his services in India.

Levett-Yeats was a member of the Savage Club in London, as well as the Punjab and United Service Clubs in Lucknow. He listed his hobbies as "riding, shooting and hunting."

Sidney Kilner Levett-Yeats died at Steyning, West Sussex, in 1916.