In private, the journals suggest, she was forthright and opinionated, a budding artist, who delighted in the detail and humor of everyday life. In public, Potter, the author of “ The Tale of Peter Rabbit” and “ The Tale of Benjamin Bunny,” whose books have now sold more than two hundred and fifty million copies, was demure and perfectly respectable. Her journals remained a mystery until 1958, when a collector, searching through them, identified a passing reference to Louis XVI, and then painstakingly decoded years’ worth of Potter’s innermost thoughts. Perhaps to protect her work, Potter wrote in a minuscule handwriting using a code that only she could understand. Her parents, descendants of wealthy cotton merchants in the North of England, were rich and exceedingly proper. Between the ages of fourteen and thirty, she fastidiously recorded observations about her stiff Victorian world in several journals. Many teen-agers will go to great lengths to keep their diaries private-I kept a little key for mine in a wooden jewelry box, which I guarded jealously-but the children’s book author Beatrix Potter took it to an extreme.
Born in London, Beatrix Potter felt drawn to the country.
0 kommentar(er)
