Volume 7, Number 10 · December 15, 1966
Inscapist
By Janet Adam Smith
The Journal of Beatrix Potter from 1881 to 1897
transcribed from her code writing by Leslie Linder
Warne, 448 pp., $12.95
'Please Close this GATE' orders the notice. You do, and you walk up the flagged path between the phlox and the heliotrope, the spreading rhubarb, and the old-fashioned roses, and gaze at the porch and the stone walls, and you almost expect to see Tom Kitten bursting out of the house, or a policeman coming up the path with a despondent little pig who has lost his licence to go to market. For the 'H.B.P. 1906' carved on the wall affirms that this Hill Top Farm in the village of Sawrey in the English Lake District was bought by Helen Beatrix Potter, out of her first earnings from her children's tales; and if you loved these tales as a child, or as you read them to your children, all seems familiar about the farm, even at a first visit. You have seen it all before in the pictures to Jemima Puddleduck, Tom Kitten, The Roly Poly Pudding, Pigling Bland. No children's books are more firmly rooted in a real place and the life lived in it. 'I do not remember a time,' Beatrix Potter told a friend who had asked about the origin of her animal stories,
Review, 2176 words
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