Whimsy: October 2022 Archives

The Secret Life of Beatrix Potter | The New Yorker

Review of a new book about Beatrix Potter. In 2018, our family visited the gallery in the office of Potter's lawyer husband, in Hawkshead, Lancashire, in the Lake District.

"In early adulthood, Potter observed her pets closely, inventing narratives about them, and filling her letters to the children of friends with their adventures. Her dispatches are playful and alive, illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings of rabbits.... Potter sent the Moore children story after story in illustrated letters, until Noel's mother suggested that she try to turn them into books. (The children had saved their copies.) In 1901, Potter self-published the first edition of 'The Tale of Peter Rabbit,' which appeared almost exactly as she had written it to Noel, down to Peter's 'blue jacket with brass buttons, quite new.'... Potter believed that her first books found an audience because they were written for real children. 'It is much more satisfactory to address a real live child,' she wrote. 'I often think that that was the secret of the success of Peter Rabbit, it was written to a child--not made to order.'"