Over the Hills and Far Away by Matthew Dennison

There was wonder in “the beautifully minute differences and fittings together of the bones”.Īs an adult, while writing tales of mice wearing bonnets and ducks wearing shawls, she remained committed to the importance of granting children access to the savagery of nature. If, as a teenager, she encountered dead animals, they would be “boiled, stripped of fur and flesh and reassembled as skeletons” to be stored in her “little bone cupboard”. Potter’s childhood love of, and belief in, fairies and the Loch Ness monster would stay with her throughout her adult life, but she was sturdily un-squeamish about the realities of the natural world. Potter’s biography might be read as a kind of pre-emptive response to this exchange, for it tells the story of a woman in whom an intense love of the fantastic and the sentimental could and did sit alongside a view of the non-human world that, while always loving, was robustly practical, lucid, rational.īeatrix Potter: her deep love of animals, and of the natural world, was constant, vigorous and inclusive Of course I’m not going to stop reading Potter.” But the emotion is there & she touches it. “I felt somewhat at a loss,” he confessed to Jones: “I do sometimes feel ashamed of liking these sweet little bunnies. In Larkin’s account of the letter, which he relayed to another of his girlfriends (Monica Jones), Strang had accused him “of not liking animals at all, only Potter ones & ones on my mantelpiece”. In 1952, almost 10 years after Beatrix Potter’s death, the young Philip Larkin received a letter from his sometime girlfriend, Patsy Strang, in which he was reprimanded for his sentimental attitude to animals.

Over the Hills and Far Away by Matthew Dennison