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

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.

Because Potter claimed that its content was "too personal—too autobiographical" (qtd. in Linder 325) The Fairy Caravan was not published in Britain.² But its success in America was sufficient to encourage McKay to bring out two further long Beatrix Potter stories: The Tale of Little Pig Robinson, the last of her small-format picture books about animal characters, in 1930, and Sister Anne in 1932.

Sister Anne was originally intended by Potter for the Fairy Caravan, but rejected for that purpose by the publisher. It, too, appeared only in America, and it was illustrated by an American, Katharine Sturges.³ This is an unusual work within Potter's oeuvre for many reasons: the story is atypically long, novella length; it retells a complete and familiar fairy tale⁴; and it anticipates an older child or adolescent—even adult—reader. The characters are all adult humans, yet the book retains a part of its original Fairy Caravan frame, in that it is narrated by mice. Sister Anne did not sell well (see Lear 409) and has received little attention ever since. Few Potter scholars have commented on it at any length, perhaps because her biographer Margaret Lane dismissed it in 1946 as virtually unreadable: "a pretentious failure" (139).⁵

This anomalous, and anomalously unsuccessful, Beatrix Potter story is the subject of my essay. I disagree with the negative view of Sister Anne—as, apparently, did Potter herself.⁶ The book is hardly comparable in stature to her greatest work, but I have found it rewarding to study, both as a retelling of the traditional tale of Bluebeard, and as a late work by the author. While academic interest in Potter increases steadily, and was notably amplified by the volume Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit: A Children's Classic at 100 (2002), edited by Margaret Mackey, I think it is still foreign to our idea of Potter that she could be a difficult writer. To demonstrate the interest of this late novel to readers today, I argue first that our readings of Potter should be prepared to accommodate the possibility that a book of hers might be difficult to read. This discussion lays the groundwork for my subsequent exploration of a number of facets of the experimental and challenging aspects of Potter's text in Sister Anne: the peculiar conjunctions of realism and folktale reference in the text; its varied language use and resulting marked instability of tone; and its Victorian intertext in a jocular Thackeray rewriting of the tale of Bluebeard. I conclude by arguing the responsiveness of this odd text to both feminist and modernist readings.

Perhaps for too long Potter's books have been conceived of as attractive mainly to small children, girls, middle-aged spinsters, sentimental old ladies, and so forth. In 1996 John...