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Between 1902 and 1918, Beatrix Potter published twenty storybooks and two books of nursery rhymes for children. All were illustrated by Potter, all featured animal characters as protagonists, all were both popular and profitable. But it was over ten years before the author next published a storybook. During those ten years, Potter made many American friends; they wrote to her and came to visit because they admired her work, and she was attracted to them by their intelligent and well-informed appreciation of her achievements, professional interest in children's literature having begun rather earlier in the United States than it did in Britain.1 Under pressure from an especially enthusiastic visiting American publisher, in 1929 Potter finally revised an earlier project, The Fairy Caravan, for publication with David McKay in Philadelphia. This was a very different book from her small picture books about small animals. The Fairy Caravan is a novel-length set of stories linked by a frame narrative about a traveling circus of animals, told by a variety of different animal narrators. But although the content of The Fairy Caravan is fantastic, the settings are not. The frame story is set in the area where Potter lived, and a cock, sheep, and dogs from her own farm are among the characters.
Because Potter claimed that its content was "too personal-too autobiographical" (qtd. in Linder 325) The Fairy Caravan was not published in Britain.2 But its success in America was sufficient to encourage McKay to bring out two further long Beatrix Potter stories: The Tale of Little Pig Robinson, the last of her small-format picture books about animal characters, in 1930, and Sister Anne in 1932.
Sister Anne was originally intended by Potter for the Fairy Caravan, but rejected for that purpose by the publisher. It, too, appeared only in America, and it was illustrated by an American, Katharine Sturges.3 This is an unusual work within Potter's oeuvre for many reasons: the story is atypically long, novella length; it retells a complete and familiar fairy tale4; and it anticipates an older child or adolescent-even adult-reader. The characters are all adult humans, yet the book retains a part of its original Fairy Caravan frame, in that it is narrated by mice. Sister Anne did not sell well (see...