Volume 54, Number 4 · March 15, 2007
The Heroine of Hill Top Farm
By John Lanchester
Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature
by Linda Lear
St. Martin's, 584 pp., $30.00
Miss Potter
a film directed by Chris Noonan
In 1912, by which time Beatrix Potter, the author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, was a hugely successful forty-six-year-old writer and illustrator, she sent her publisher Harold Warne a new story, her darkest yet, called The Tale of Mr. Tod. The story is about an argument between a fox and a badger, and features the abduction and near death of a sackful of baby rabbits. The story had a particularly good opening sentence: 'I am quite tired of making goody goody books about nice people.' But the candor and acerbity of that were too much for Warne, and he fussed until Potter agreed to change the opening to something inarguably less punchy: 'I have made many books about well-behaved people.' Before she succumbed to this bad editorial advice, Potter relieved herself of her feelings in a letter to Warne:
Review, 3834 words
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