Of Mice and Women: Beatrix Potter's Bluebeard Story, Sister Anne

Abstract

Between 1902 and 1918, Beatrix Potter published twenty storybooks and two books of nursery rhymes for children. All were illustrated by Potter, all featured animal characters as protagonists, all were both popular and profitable. But it was over ten years before the author next published a storybook. During those ten years, Potter made many American friends; they wrote to her and came to visit because they admired her work, and she was attracted to them by their intelligent and well-informed appreciation of her achievements, professional interest in children’s literature having begun rather earlier in the United States than it did in Britain. 1 Under pressure from an especially enthusiastic visiting American publisher, in 1929 Potter finally revised an earlier project, The Fairy Caravan, for publication with David McKay in Philadelphia. This was a very different book from her small picture books about small animals. The Fairy Caravan is a novel-length set of stories linked by a frame narrative about a traveling circus of animals, told by a variety of different animal narrators. But although the content of The Fairy Caravan is fantastic, the settings are not. The frame story is set in the area where Potter lived, and a cock, sheep, and dogs from her own farm are among the characters.