Over the Hills and Far Away by Matthew Dennison

She had nightmare parents, selfish and controlling even by the standards of the age The fact that the Potters were dissenters set them apart from society, and partly explains the dreary isolation of Beatrix’s childhood.

They were Unitarians (alongside Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Gaskell and a host of other Victorian grandees), a sect of dissenters who disputed the divinity of Jesus, favoured by the 19th-century equivalent of the “chattering classes” nowadays they would be Hampstead socialists. Her parents were wealthy from money made in trade, which had the effect of making them snobbish. Dennison’s Miss Potter is far more complex a serious artist, struggling to forge an identity in a society that expected its females to be wives and mothers or dutiful daughters. His portrait of the woman is dramatically at odds with what I thought I knew about her from the dull films of my childhood - meek, repressed, solitary, deeply genteel. Matthew Dennison’s fascinating biography, Over the Hills and Far Away, goes to the heart of this peculiar dislocation in Potter’s work. Nature is red in tooth and claw, even when adorably kitted out in a little blue jacket. Squirrel Nutkin has his tail ripped off by an angry owl. Peter Rabbit narrowly escapes being killed and eaten. Matthew Dennison, who recently published a new biography of Beatrix Potter presents the story of her life in his book “Over the Hills and Far Away”.Īnyone who has tried to read her stories to a small child will know, the stories themselves are often violent and unsettling, and the last thing you need at bedtime.

Over the Hills and Far Away by Matthew Dennison