Word: beatrix
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Born. To Crown Princess Juliana Louise Emma Marie Wilhelmina of The Netherlands, 37, and Prince Bernhard, 35: their fourth child, fourth daughter (the others: Beatrix, 9, Irene, 7, Margriet, 4); at Soestdijk Palace, The Netherlands. Weight: 6 Ibs. 10 oz. Daughter's birth rated a 51-gun salute, a quarter-hour's pealing of church bells (a son-who would have been the first male heir to the throne in 62 years-would rate 101 guns, a half-hour's bell-ringing...
European biographers did little better. Biographical surprise-of-the-year was Britisher Margaret Lane's admirable The Tale of Beatrix Potter, the story of the eccentric lady who fashioned and illustrated the children's beloved Peter Rabbit. Charles Dickens, by Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, cast no light on Dickens' working manners, much on his bedside manner. Stefan Zweig's posthumous, unfinished Balzac might have said more if Zweig had lived to finish the telling. Hesketh Pearson's Oscar Wilde was a sober, intelligent study of a man-and type-who is rarely treated with either...
...Beatrix Potter "knew it was quite unnecessary to distort animals and make them 'funny' in order to touch the imagination of a child. On the contrary, it was their very beauty, and the seriousness and reality of their little world, which had held her entranced through the long summer holidays of her own childhood." Some of the animals in the illustrations of the Potter Tales are set in their frames with the dignity and charm of aristocrats in old English miniatures...
...Beatrix Potter was 47 when her creative life came to a sharp stop. On a trip to the Lake District she met and later married William Heelis, a gentle, retiring country lawyer. Mr. Potter was furious, but from then on, says Author Lane, Beatrix "deliberately buried Miss Potter of Bolton Gardens and became another person." She invested her royalties in farmland, flung all her energies into raising sheep. She invented a trap for catching maggot-flies, wrote knowledgeably to friends about housewifery and cooking ("Wm. prefers blue smoke before the bacon is laid on the frying pan"). As the years...
...years passed, the parents of the thousands of children who devoured her books took it for granted that Beatrix Potter was long since dead-a notion that Mrs. Heelis of Sawrey did her best to encourage. The few who unveiled her incognita and greeted her as a great artist were received with "the searching, expressionless stare of a little animal." Then she would shout: "Great rubbish! Absolute bosh...