The Cottage Tales Narrator

BookScapes 11, June 2024

I lived with the Cottage Tales for nearly ten years—eight books, some 700,000 published words, uncounted hours, weeks, months. That’s a long time in a writer’s life (in anybody’s life!), so perhaps you won’t be surprised that my understanding of the characters, the settings, and how the story might be told changed during that decade.

For instance: when I began Book 1, Beatrix and I were just getting acquainted. I had read several biographies but I hadn’t yet buckled down to the serious business of meeting her on the page. I had visited present-day Sawrey but still had little idea what it was like to live there a century before. I hadn’t yet met all of the animals who would make their way into the books or learned enough of the landscape and history of that lovely region.

And I hadn’t yet met our Narrator, the “I” who was mostly absent from Books 1 and 2 but declared herself firmly in the first sentence of Book 3: “The tale I am about to tell you begins on a bright, clear, April-sweet morning in the Lake District village of Sawrey . . .” That storytelling voice, confident already, grew so insistent in the later books that even the most inattentive readers had to notice her.

Let’s start by getting one thing straight. I—Susan Albert—am the silent and mostly invisible narrator of Books 1 and 2. That is, I tell the story pretty much as usual, without calling attention to myself as author or to my storytelling. That begins to change in Book 3, when the Narrator shows up and begins to take possession of the storytelling—a process that becomes increasingly dominant as she becomes more experienced and more fully in possession of what has become her story.

And if you didn’t love her, I have to say that I don’t much blame you. She often sounds to me like a British village school teacher, got up in a Gibson Girl shirtwaist and a long tweed skirt. She belongs to the nineteenth-century novel or (just as likely) to children’s stories. We grown-up Post-Moderns are done with all that.

And she has her faults. Oh, yes—and I was the first to notice them. To start with, she often gets the way of the story’s forward progress, as when she lingers over the lifestyle of those pesky rats in the Hill Top attics:

Now, if you have ever been acquainted with rats (and most of us have, in one way or another), you know that they are astonishingly intelligent along practical lines: where to find the best cheese and bacon, how to be stealthy when stealth is required, and which is the quickest means of escape when danger threatens . . . [and here she goes on for another 150 words!] —The Tale of Cuckoo Brow Wood (p. 32, Kindle Edition)

She speculates where there is clearly no basis for her interpretation. Worse, she likes to share her moral opinions:

Norman’s death allowed Mr. and Mrs. Potter to escape the shameful indignity of a marriage into a commercial publishing family. And if they privately congratulated themselves upon their narrow escape (as I have no doubt they did), I shouldn’t be surprised to learn that they also allowed their daughter to see their great relief. There is no record of what they said to her, but I imagine it to have been something on the order of “There, there, dear. Clearly, the good Lord did not mean you to marry this person. You’ll get over it.”—The Tale of Castle Cottage (p. 22, Kindle Edition)

She frequently tells us what and how (or how not) to think:

Now, you may think it strange and perhaps even silly that a woman of Beatrix Potter’s age (I won’t say exactly what that is, but some might say she was old enough to know better) would get down on her hands and knees to hunt for fairy doorways in the mossy roots of old oak trees, or stop to build a little garden-house for fairies who wanted to have their supper out of doors. But if that’s what you think, you must think again. The Tale of Cuckoo Brow Wood (p. 234, Kindle Edition)

She has an annoying habit of referring to a previous book—which also reminds us that we are, in fact, reading a book:

But there. I shan’t spoil the story for you. You can read it for yourself in The Tale of Hawthorn House, and be as puzzled as I am (I confess to not quite understanding the whole affair) about the intervention of the mysterious Mrs. Overthewall. She always seemed to be at exactly the right place at exactly the right time to make things happen in exactly the right way. You and I should be so clever.—The Tale of Briar Bank (pp. 41-42) Kindle Edition

She clearly enjoys practicing the art of stage management. What’s more, she likes to make director’s comments on it, explaining how a scene should or should not work (sort of like the “making of” segments on a movie DVD):

You will notice that we have come back into the scene just where we went out, and that nothing at all has happened while we’ve been absent. Writers and readers of stories, you see, enjoy special privileges. In books, we are not limited to the arrangement of events as we are in the world of railway timetables and appointment calendars, which are organized chronologically and require one to be in the appointed place at the appointed time or all is lost. This, when you get right down to it, is a very tedious sort of ordering, and I for one am glad we’re not limited by it. Therefore. We have returned to the kitchen just as Bosworth propped . . . — The Tale of Applebeck Orchard (p. 194, Kindle Edition)

Or complains when a scene doesn’t work the way she wants it to:

Margaret and Annie have talked about [the possibility of a move to Brighton] behind our backs, as it were, not even letting us know that the subject was about to come up so that we could hurry over to Lakefield Cottages and listen in. I call that rude, I do. If I were in full charge of this story, it would certainly be better managed.—The Tale of Applebeck Orchard (p. 191, Kindle Edition)

Or makes excuses for not managing very well:

Crumpet gave a hard, triumphant laugh, the laugh of a cat who has the upper paw. She leaned forward and whispered a name, just loud enough for Tabitha and Rascal to hear—but not loud enough for us, I’m afraid. (I suppose we might have moved closer, but I shouldn’t like to be accused of eavesdropping.) The Tale of Hawthorn House  (p. 18, Kindle Edition)

And sometimes she makes a game of reminding us that we are actually reading a book:

That is how Miss Potter, in the company of Winston and Rascal, came to be crossing the bridge over Wilfin Beck a few minutes after nine on a misty, drizzly morning, right in the middle of Chapter Thirteen.—The Tale of Applebeck Orchard (p. 138) Kindle Edition.

There are many other examples, for I found this particular Narrator to be especially insistent about what she obviously considered to be her job in this book. And try as I might to get her to sit in the corner and let me get on with things, she kept pushing her way into the story. By the end of Book 3, I threw in the towel. Our Narrator had made herself at home. She was here to stay.

I’ve spent a fair amount of your time complaining, and I apologize. To be truthful, the more Our Narrator inserted herself into this story, the more I appreciated what I had viewed as flaws: adding extraneous but interesting detail, speculating about events, calling attention to stage management or pulling us out of the story at a moment when we’re most deeply in it. And there are quite a few other crafty little tricks that we don’t have time to go into here. I have to admit that I grew fonder of her with every book and began to think of more ways she might be useful.

For one thing, she made it easy to work in the extra bits—the private lives of rats or fairies or passages from Beatrix’s own Little Books—that might be distracting but were also endearing. Who knew that dragons hibernated (as it were) in abandoned badger setts?

And I liked her voice, for it reminded me of the sympathetic but reproving narrator in many of Miss Potter’s tales, like this from Peter Rabbit:

I am sorry to say that Peter was not very well during the evening. His mother put him to bed, and made some camomile tea.

Or the lecturish narrator of Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies:

The name of the place is Vendale; and if you want to see it for yourself, you must go up into the High Craven, and search from Bolland Forest north by Ingleborough, to the Nine Standards and Cross Fell; and if you have not found it, you must turn south, and search the Lake Mountains, down to Scaw Fell and the sea; and then, if you have not found it, you must go northward again by merry Carlisle, and search the Cheviots all across, from Annan Water to Berwick Law; and then, whether you have found Vendale or if not, you will have found such a country, and such a people, as ought to make you proud of being a British boy.

For another thing (and not a small thing at all), her not-so-subtle suggestions about how to read a certain situation allowed me to put a nineteenth-century interpretive frame around a scene that I thought might be helpful to a twentieth-century reader—for instance, her description (above) of Beatrix looking for fairy doorways in the roots of an old oak.

But while our Narrator is very 19th-century, she is at the same time quite contemporary. At the risk of getting literary, hers is a postmodern meta-narrative strategy. It calls attention to the fact of story as story—a reminder that there is a human maker at work, making a certain sense of events that happened long ago. And that there are readers at work, too, who (whether they know it or not) are helping to make sense of the story, too. In other words, this is not a me-to- you enterprise. It is a community of characters, readers, narrator, and writer. We’re all there together, on every page.

Bottom line and all things considered: I grew so fond of our Narrator that I was glad to merge my voice with hers in the very last chapter of the final book: her sentimental plan for the wedding of Miss Potter and Mr. Heelis, and my own rather snippy description. In case your copy of that book isn’t handy, I’ve posted the chapter on my WordPress site, for you to read when you have a few minutes. (Not saying you have to, just that it’s there.)

Stories don’t always end where their authors intended. But there is joy in following them, wherever they take us. —Beatrix Potter