Description
Near Fine dust jacket. The Near Fine binding is brick red cloth over boards with gilt stamping on spine. The binding is tight and pages are clean. The book contains reproductions of letters written by Beatrix Potter and some of her illustrations.
Edited by Jane Crowell Morse (from the dust jacket)
“MOST WELCOME!” Beatrix Potter Heelis wrote to an American children’s book editor in 1930. “I always tell nice Americans to send other nice Americans along. Perhaps ‘understanding Americans’ would be a better adjective than ‘nice.” You come because you understand the books.. . not from any impertinent curiosity.’
After her marriage to William Heelis in 1913, Beatrix Potter lived in the Lake District where she devoted herself to raising sheep and helping to conserve land for the National Trust. She did not want to be bothered by celebrity seekers, curious only to meet the author-illustrator of favorite childhood books, until a 1921 visit by Anne Carroll Moore, a well-known children’s librarian, convinced her of the sincere American interest in her work. Soon she welcomed visits from other Americans and kept the friendships alive with warm personal letters, even in the difficult years of World War II. Although Beatrix Potter and Bertha Mahony Miller, founder of The Horn Book Magazine, never met, they began a lively correspondence in 1926. Their letters covered a wide range of subjects and lasted until the artist’s death in r943. Beatrix Heelis was interested in many things: art, children’s books, country life, conservation, place names and language sheep, old furniture, human behavior, and international politics. Her observations were keen; her opinions blunt. This is her own record of her purposeful life of achievement’ between 192r and I943. The twenty full color illustrations, one pencil drawing, and one pen-and-ink sketch included in this volume, although familiar subjects, are mostly from private collections and reproduced for the first time Museum-quality care has gone into their reproduction.
JANE CROWELL MORSE has enjoyed a career of teaching composition and literature in New England schools and universities since her graduation from Mount Holyoke College in 1945 and from the University of Maine in I947. Since I96I she has been a member of the English Department at Boston University. Storytelling and reviewing children’s books have been an avocation which she has practiced in America, Japan, and New Zealand. She has been a reviewer for the publications of the National Association of Independent Schools and for The Horn Book Magazine. Presently she is member of the Horn Book Council. A native of Bangor, Maine Jane and her husband, the poet Samuel French Morse, spend their summers enjoying and helping to conserve the natural resources of eastern Maine.
