Last week we had a
very distinguished guest speaker, Juliet Dusinberre, the author of
Alice to the Lighthouse,
one of the best critical studies of children's literature, written
almost thirty years ago. She talked about Beatrix Potter, and this
talk very nearly made me change my mind, once again, about the value
of biographical information for literary studies. I didn't know much
about Beatrix Potter beyond basic facts (I guess, most of them from
the movie, Miss Potter), and the letters and diaries that Juliet
spoke about were really illuminating. One of our students wrote an excellent blog post about this talk, so I won't repeat it.
What struck me,
however, was the similarity of Potter's life and struggle to her
contemporary, the Swedish Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlöf. Once
upon a time I was a Lagerlöf scholar (published a book and several
articles), and even then I wasn't interested in her biography, and
even then I was wrong because there were many facts in her life that
were reflected in her writing and therefore worth knowing. For
instance, the loss – or threat of loss – of the childhood home
surfaces in all her novels. When she got the Prize – first female
writer ever to receive it – she bought back her father's estate,
and, much like Potter, kept buying adjacent land and expanding
farming. As rich and famous, she still had to challenge her male
fellow writers and was often referred to as "fairy tale auntie".
Unlike Potter, she wrote novels, but she also wrote one book for
children that is, at least internationally, better known than her
novels, The Wonderful Adventures of
Nils. Among many remarkable things she
does in this book, commissioned as a geography textbook, she is a
passionate animal rights promoter. Could she be familiar with Beatrix
Potter's books? Possibly. Could Potter have read Nils?
It was translated into English early. Does it matter? Not really.
Of the many famous words
by Lagerlöf, my favourite is from her diary: "Today I sold
twenty sacks of flour and a short story". That could have been
Beatrix Potter.
