Sister Anne

One of my longest-running reading projects is the works of Beatrix Potter. My interest in Potter began with a very good children's biography of her called Nothing Is Impossible, by Dorothy Aldis, which I discovered at the Julius Forstmann Public Library in Passaic where I grew up. The library owned most of Potter's works, too, so I began reading them then and have continued to read and re-read them in spurts over the years. Although several of them were published in larger or fold-out formats originally, the "canonical" series of 23 books (Peter Rabbit to Little Pig Robinson) are mainly familiar in the tiny editions published by Frederick Warne. Over the years four more Potter manuscripts have been published in a similar format: Wag-by-Wall, The Faithful Dove, The Sly Old Cat, and Tuppenny. There are also two longer works that qualify as novels and that were published in a conventionally sized format late in Potter's life, The Fairy Caravan and Sister Anne. I had never gotten around to reading these and recently ordered both through interlibrary loan.

As Potter's eyesight declined the text-to-pictures proportions of her books changed markedly; the later books generally have many more words. So it was natural in a way that Potter should eventually prepare true long fictions. The Fairy Caravan (which I am halfway through) is something of a miscellany of oddments and episodes, held together by the conceptual backbone of a traveling animal circus invisible to human eyes. But Sister Anne, a retelling of the Bluebeard story, has a true sustained narrative line. It is also by far the most adult of Potter's published work; the least-known and the least-read (it had but one edition and was not reprinted after 1932; my loan came from a university library). One might wonder about the suitability for children of a book featuring this cheery verse:

What did he do with her tongue so rough?
Unto the violl it spake enough!
What did he do with her nose ridge?
Unto the violl he made it a bridge.
Down, down, hey down.
What did he do with her fingers small?
He made him pegs to his violl withall.

Sister Anne is a gorgeously strange book, written in tight prose with somewhat unfamiliar but evocative short words of an antique rural flavor ("haugh," "mell," "rabbletail," "shippons," and so on). Ultimately it compares quite favorably with Bela Bartok's wonderful opera Duke Blubeard's Castle as a version of this familiar tale. The first paragraph conveys the writing style and the atmosphere achieved by it:

In days of old a castle stood upon the hill beyond the Sands. East and north beyond the landward slope there was huddled a gray squalid town. Towards the sea and the south the castle rock rose sheer, with wind-blown sand at foot -- sand that edged the coast for leagues in benty hillocks. Salt water lapped against the sand ridges at high tide; but at most hours of the day and night the bay was covered with mud. It stretched for miles and miles, glittering like gold at sunset, shining like silver at moonrise, treacherous with shifting quicksands when the tide came up. Rows of stakes half buried in slime marked fords across fresh-water channels, to guide those venturesome travellers who chose to cross the Sands instead of following the coast road round the bay.