![]() "She told a good story, clearly and simply," says Routledge, who retraced Potter's footsteps around the Lake District for her film, which aired last night on More4. The discovery of a new Potter story was enough to persuade Patricia Routledge, the actress and patron of the Beatrix Potter Society, to present her first television documentary. "It had all the pace, humour and edginess of her earlier tales." "What struck me was how polished the tale was," she says. Jo Hanks, publisher of Penguin Random House Children's books, stumbled across the story of the cat she describes as a "con artist" in Leslie Linder's history of Potter's writings, now long out of print. Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is assured that Kitty won't eat her, because if she did there would be no one left to do her laundry. She has a 24-hour stand-off with Mr Tod worthy of a western.Įventually, in an unmistakable commentary on the hierarchies of social class, she is released from Mr Tod's trap by her own washerwoman. She scratches the faces of John Stoat-Ferret and his cousin Slimmy Jimmy and spits at them. Kitty is a match for Potter's worst villains. Peter Rabbit puts in an appearance - as a portly old boy who taunts Kitty with an umbrella - and, in a wonderful stroke of camp, fashion prevails over violence. "Madam," Mr Tod the fox says, archly, "I beg you to put down that most unsafe fire-arm." #Beatrix potter cats full#Though Kitty is full of bravado, her gun goes off accidentally all the time. The story is full of Potter's usual succinct alliteration, and her precise realist detail - Kitty takes a bullet from "a 3d mustard tin" she eats "one mouse (raw)".īut there is a degree of slapstick that's more freewheeling than Potter had previously allowed herself. When Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, surprised by a bullet shot through her washing, calls Kitty "Sir", she is "rather flattered to be mistaken for a sportsman". Thanks to Winkiepeeps, a scruffy doppelgänger who takes her place at home, she escapes into the woody underworld armed with a gun, slumming it with "common" cats and standing up to stoats. By day, Kitty is the self-styled 'Miss Catherine St Quentin', well-behaved pet of a kind old lady by night, she is 'Squintums', or 'Q', a poacher who dresses in "a gentleman's Norfolk jacket and little fur-lined boots". Her manuscript, handwritten in a one-penny exercise book preserved in the archives of the Victoria and Albert Museum, is headed Kitty-in-Boots.īut in hindsight the title she might have reached for is 'The Tale of the Cross-Dressing Cat'.īecause although the story, which Potter finished writing but never fully illustrated, is sure to delight children when published in September (with accompanying drawings by Quentin Blake), feminists and queer theorists will also have every reason to welcome Potter's extraordinary invention.įourteen years before Virginia Woolf published Orlando, Potter concocted this story of a prim black cat with a double, genderbending life. "I have not hammered out any name for the next book," Potter wrote to her publisher, Harold Warne, in February 1914, "but will do so as soon as I can." Over 100 years later, Penguin Random House is finally to publish Potter's "24th tale", as A Tale of Kitty in Boots - a book that may turn on its head everything we think we know about the children's author. Kitty-in-Boots was written just before the outbreak of the First World War but was never published in Potter's lifetime. Yet the creator of Peter Rabbit and Hunca-Munca once wrote a story that featured all of them. Doppelgängers and transvestites, guns and gangsters, secret lives: these are not the first things that come to mind with Beatrix Potter. ![]()
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