Word: beatrix
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...Beatrix (pronounced Beatrice) never went to school, rarely saw other children. She had one black doll named Topsy, and on special occasions she was allowed to play with a stuffed...
...sometimes Grandmama came to visit. She was regal and beautiful. She told little Beatrix wonderful stories of her youth-about the adorer who had first written her a beautiful poem, beginning "Sweet harp of Lune Villa!" and then drowned himself in the lily-pond (some said he only tripped and fell in), and about another adorer who was unfortunately "quite a common man. My mother directed the footman to put him under the pump." Grandmama never knew that the little girl, under cover of drawing butterflies, was recording every word in self-made shorthand, written in a script so tiny...
...Never Grew Up." In the summer, the Potters went to Scotland or the Lake District, where Mr. Potter hunted and indulged his hobby-collecting autographed letters of the Lake Poets. It was there that Beatrix discovered "the child's half-real, half-fantastic world of pond and ditch, stone walls and foxgloves, woods and sandy warrens"-side by side with "the crowded informal cottage gardens," the cupboards and dressers, the huge ranges with their pans of dough rising under "an old clean blanket." All these things Beatrix carried back in her mind to London, and, in her own words...
When the little girl was 35, she had the audacious idea of sending an illustrated story about a rabbit to a publisher. Six publishers promptly rejected it. With a second streak of audacity, Beatrix drew out her small savings and had The Tale of Peter Rabbit printed at her own expense. Then she resubmitted it to the firm of Warne & Co.; who, this time, accepted it. "I have not spoken to Mr. Potter," wrote Beatrix timidly to her publisher, "but I think, Sir, it would be well to explain the agreement clearly, because he is a little formal, having been...
Peter Rabbit was followed, in the next few years, by two more Tales-The Tailor of Gloucester, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. Then stern Father Potter called a halt. "I have had such painful unpleasantness at home," wrote Beatrix to her publisher, "that I should be obliged if you will kindly say no more about a new book." When Publisher Norman Warne, who had fallen head over heels in love with his shy little author, responded with a proposal of marriage, Mr. Potter was horrified. He forbade the marriage on the grounds that no daughter of his should marry "trade...