For many readers, Mary Gaitskill is a writer whose image precedes her work. Possibly you’ve seen Secretary; possibly you’ve just read the magazine profiles that pop up every time she has a new book out. The word those profile writers love to assign her is “dark.” New York magazine once even went so far as to call her a “downtown princess of darkness.” So far as one can tell, this word is used because her stories and novels (Bad Behavior, Veronica) are so often about people who can be said, in some way, to have chosen the way they suffer in life, and even to find some kind of fulfillment in that suffering. In America, where every life is supposed to be underwritten by the pursuit of happiness, Gaitskill’s preoccupations are thought perverse and depressing by default.

Well, look closer: a new collection of Gaitskill’s prose gives us a writer best described as positively playful. In Somebody with a Little Hammer, which collects essays that have been published elsewhere, we get a writer so far from self-serious that she even jokes about her own brooding image. In a takedown of Gone Girl included in this collection, she relates her experience reading the book on a long rail journey: “By the time the train ride was over, I felt I was reading something truly sick and dark,” she quips, “and in case you don’t know, I’m supposedly sick and dark.”

This piece, which originally appeared in Bookforum, is one of the more revealing things Gaitskill has ever written, although it isn’t in the least autobiographical. It reveals instead a key distinction between the way Gaitskill thinks a book should work and the way a writer like Gillian Flynn thinks it should work. Gaitskill concedes that the novel is clever. She sees its cold, calculating anti-heroine, Amy, as powerfully hooking into an older idea that women are “filthy, vicious idiots” who “claw at each other/bond over who is doing it best.” Yet that formulation of subjectivity bothers Gaitskill. She does not like the way the character reduces to these violent, controlling impulses. It doesn’t fit her idea of the world, and more to the point it seems a little dangerous. “[T]his book seems a little too enamored with Amy’s view of the world, and misuses its power in something like the way its protagonist misuses hers,” Gaitskill concludes.

To someone accustomed to Gaitskill’s “dark” image, this moralist’s objection to Gone Girl might seem a little incongruous. But to a more careful reader, it’s of a piece with the strong empathetic bent that has always guided her depictions of allegedly sick people. The power of her work has always derived from the small element of humanity she finds in her characters’ Bad Behavior.

In nonfiction Gaitskill proves a very effective analyst of her own impulses. In this collection is her 1994 Harper’s essay “On Not Being a Victim.” (Here it has been wordily retitled “On ‘Date Rape,’ ‘Victim Culture’ and Personal Responsibility.”) In it, Gaitskill describes a nonconsensual sexual experience that she says she described for years as a rape before coming to the conclusion that the word did not capture the complexity of the experience. It certainly was the case, she writes, that she hadn’t wanted to have sex, but her experience of the world as governed by social codes had taught her that her own desires were less important than some imagined rules. “I didn’t know what to do in a situation where no rules obtained and that required me to speak up on my own behalf,” Gaitskill writes. “I had never been taught that my behalf mattered.”

This qualified, considered view of difficult questions means that Gaitskill sacrifices the propulsive force of the firebrand for the more unsettled role of the essayist. The result is that it’s much more difficult to forget the insights that she comes to. By tethering herself to the complexities of human experience, Gaitskill gets a lot more mileage out of her subject that a writer of lesser intelligence does.

Put together here, all her essays do seem to be making a similar point: what looks like one kind of humanity, from a distance, is actually something more internally conflicted, more lost to itself. In a piece about the film version of her short story, Secretary, Gaitskill finds herself objecting to the way that her main character’s ambivalence was written out of the story. In a piece about Linda Lovelace, the star of the 1970s pornographic epic Deep Throat, she is concerned that all readings of the woman, who in her lifetime was both a porn star and an anti-pornography crusader, fail to embrace the notion that she could have had contradictory feelings about the whole thing. For example, of a memoir Lovelace once wrote about her allegedly abusive relationship, Gaitskill writes: “I imagined that Lovelace simply lacked the confidence to describe what she did and felt in a nuanced way, and that the thing was very, very nuanced and contradictory. ” And come to think of it, “very, very nuanced and contradictory” is probably a better way to describe Gaitskill than “dark.” But that, of course, doesn’t make for such a romantic headline.

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Type the word “nothing” into a Google search, and up pops “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” with more than six and a half million results for Robert Frost’s treasured eight-line poem, first published in 1923. Kristen Radtke’s haunting graphic memoir, a melancholic meditation on impermanence, essentially drops the qualifier “gold” from Frost’s assertion.

In Imagine Wanting Only This, Radtke reminds us repeatedly that loss is the only constant the world has to offer. Her mantra is, “We forget that everything will become no longer ours.” It’s a point of view catalyzed by the loss of Radtke’s beloved youngest uncle, who died of a rare congenital heart disorder while she was away at college — a disease she has also inherited.

After her uncle’s death, Radtke, a native of Wisconsin, became obsessed with blighted cities, abandoned mines, and war ruins that reflect the transitory nature of even tarnished things, whether natural or manmade. She’s fascinated by what’s missing and what’s left behind. To her chagrin, she discovers that even memorials don’t last — including the makeshift one she inadvertently transgresses when, as an undergraduate visiting a derelict abandoned cathedral in Gary, Indiana, with her boyfriend, she takes home a pile of ash-strewn photographs — which she later learns were part of a tribute to a young photographer who died at twenty-three when hit by a freight train he was photographing.

In combining a bildungsroman with a record of her ardent pursuit of ruins around the world, Radtke’s debut exemplifies a growing trend in memoir — Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse is one recent example — in which an author’s personal story is interwoven with research and reporting on a subject that has captivated her attention and shaped her life.

Imagine Wanting Only This is also part of another significant trend among memoirists — one that puts the graphic back in autobiographical narrative. Standouts include Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, David Small’s Stitches, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?  Although there’s a movement to call these books by the plainspoken term “comics,” I prefer “graphic literature,” since comic strips, with their connection to cartoons and the funnies, imply a form driven by humor — which these memoirs decidedly are not.

Whatever you choose to call it, Imagine Wanting Only This effectively meshes a distilled, starkly confessional, probing text with an equally eloquent visual element. It’s hard to imagine this book without Radtke’s darkly expressive black-and-white ink-washed drawings, through which she often zooms in on telling details — a high-heeled pump when the author is in professional mode, delivering a talk in Iceland on filmmaker Chris Marker; a forlorn bundle of mail awaiting her in Iowa City on her return from a research trip; a fragment of an iPhone screen, old newspaper clipping, or medical report conveying disturbing news.

Radtke’s artwork evokes movie stills more than comic strips, panning cinematographically from full-page landscapes to tightly framed close-ups and intense conversations (often on cellphones). She frequently holds an uncomfortable focus on herself through multiple frames as she struggles with difficult emotions, conveying, for example, her ambivalent feelings after she becomes engaged to her college boyfriend. There are many lovely, pensive self-portraits lit by the glow of a computer or phone screen, while bird’s-eye views of her anxiety-wracked insomniac nights suggest a restless, caged animal.

The overall mood is of brooding loneliness. This is often captured in panoramas of solitary walks in which the author is depicted as a small human presence against a vast backdrop. The strikingly effective cover drawing shows her dark, silhouetted, luggage-toting figure from behind, gazing out the large picture windows in a Detroit airport terminal over dark, abandoned high-rise buildings in the distance, one of several “calcifying rust-belt cities” she tries to fathom.

Radtke acknowledges that “ruinophilia” and “ruin porn” have become hip even as her obsession with deserted, forgotten sites fuels her travels through Europe, Southeast Asia, and the American West. The travelogue portions of her book, while less compelling than her moving evocation of her relationship with her uncle, capture the insatiability of her search. “It felt like I had to see everything, as if it was the only way my life would count or matter,” she writes.

This restless ambition to find answers “or at least information” about the transitory nature of existence defines Radtke’s profoundly contemplative book. “Am I supposed to want children who will mourn me or husbands I will watch lowered into the ground or houses I will endure in their emptiness?” she asks, blatantly demonstrating the kind of failure to stay in the moment that would make a Buddhist cringe. She is a disaster scenarist who, after moving to New York City, pictures its streets and subways flooded. Why? Could it be defensive, to steel herself against further loss? Or a nod to Blaise Pascal, whose Pensées so eloquently reminded us of our minute place in a vast universe?

Radtke doesn’t shy from these big, potentially overwhelming questions. Yet her takeaway offers some measure of comfort: By accepting that “someday there will be nothing left that you have touched,” you may have an easier time accepting that none of us, and none of the losses, are important. After all, in the end, all is ephemeral: Nothing gold can stay. Imagine wanting only what’s here, now. Besides, she adds, “Who knows what will be significant when we have all moved on to whatever is waiting or not waiting?”

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Reading Bernhard Schlink’s work in German and then in its English translation, as I’ve done with his latest novel, The Woman on the Stairs, can be disorienting. The original obviously affords a more direct encounter with Schlink’s style and literary sensibility. His German is structurally simple yet elegant and poetic — rhythmic and filled with assonance, alliteration, and half-rhymes. Immersing oneself in his language can be a sensuous experience.

But along with the pleasures come frustrations. For the non-native reader, the experience is akin to peering through a scrim veiling the author’s meaning — not unlike the efforts of Schlink’s protagonists to discern truth through the murk of misunderstanding.

In fact, one signature of Schlink’s fiction is the sudden perspectival shift. His plots — sometimes explicit detective stories, sometimes not — often contain elements of mystery. With each discovery, a Schlink protagonist reconsiders his view of his life, his relationships, and ultimately his own identity. Even the genre novels, like his Self trilogy, have an existential dimension.

Schlink himself is a former judge who is now a law professor, and the probing, analytical turn of mind that suits a jurist also informs his fiction. His best-known book is The Reader, an allegory of love and guilt that explores the complicated bonds between the postwar generation of Germans and their elders.

The weight of German history — the problem the Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past — is a powerful presence in Schlink’s work. Sometimes, as in The Reader,  the historical references are both explicit and central.

Hitler, the tumultuous radicalism of the 1960s, the division and reunification of Germany — all are mentioned in The Woman on the Stairs. But they serve mostly as a backdrop to an obsession with a more personal past. The subhead of an admiring online review by Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international public television station, dubbed the novel’s concerns “Vergangenheitsbewältigung light;” the review itself described them as “all too human.”

Schlink’s unnamed protagonist, who doubles as the narrator, is a successful mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who had once sought to be a judge. Stereotypically unimaginative and self-congratulatory, he disdains novels, tears, and the demands of children (including his own).

On the cusp of old age, he finds himself drawn back into the orbit of an elusive woman he had once loved and for whom he had (uncharacteristically) risked his career. Her unexplained betrayal has shadowed his otherwise conventional life, which included a marriage cut short by his politician wife’s fatal car accident.

As a fledgling lawyer, the narrator met Irene, the titular woman on the stairs, because of a legal conflict over a painting for which she had modeled. The relationship between portrait and subject — art and life, fiction and history — is another familiar Schlink theme, linked here to the interplay between past and present that shapes the book’s narrative structure.

Art has the capacity not just to idealize but, as Schlink’s characters note, to freeze time. The fictional painting — titled Woman on Staircase — directly evokes two actual ones. Irene describes the representational work as a response to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, the unsettling Cubist- and Futurist-influenced sensation of New York’s 1913 Armory Show. And in an “Author’s Note,” Schlink acknowledges the inspiration of Gerhard Richter’s Ema (Nude on a Staircase), a deliberately blurry 1966 portrait of the artist’s first wife, based on a photograph.

The novel begins when the narrator suddenly re-encounters the portrait in a Sydney, Australia, art gallery that is part of the city’s Botanic Garden — a place, he tells us, where “time stands still.” Peter Gundlach, the multimillionaire businessman once married to Irene, will later underline the point, declaring that “[p]aintings halt the march of time.”

Flashback scenes offer glimpses of the narrator’s youth, characterized by material comfort and emotional deprivation, and his initial interactions, in Frankfurt, with Irene and the portrait. The occasion of their meeting is a dispute between Karl Schwind, the painting’s creator, and Gundlach, its owner. Irene has left Gundlach for Schwind, and the two men are wrangling over both the painting and the woman, a contest in which Irene is both queen and pawn. The work in question seems to the narrator to embody a “jumble of power and seduction, resistance and surrender.” Falling hard for Irene (or perhaps just his image of her), he helps her escape the two men and abscond with the portrait. But while he fantasizes a life with her, she disappears without a trace.

The portrait, however, surfaces in Sydney, and a private eye finds Irene living, without proper papers, on a nearly deserted Australian island. Temporarily abandoning his responsibilities, the narrator sails off to meet her. Soon enough, rather improbably, Schwind and Gundlach also show up. (Literal realism has never been Schlink’s forte — nor, for that matter, his aim.) The two men argue the respective merits of art and commerce and then depart, leaving the narrator alone with the dying Irene.

The narrative unfolds in a series of short chapters, segueing between past and present in English prose that seems both staccato and unadorned. As the lawyer grows closer to Irene, he struggles with intimacy, closure, impending loss, and the homely rigors of caregiving. He slowly relinquishes his obsession with judgment by questioning his own. At Irene’s request, he becomes a modern-day Scheherazade, recounting their imagined life together as a way of staving off death. He invents a healing “fiction, but fiction in which we appeared as we really were.” It draws on his actual experiences and her suggestions and becomes, like the best novels, more vivid and true than reality.

No doubt some readers and critics will find The Woman on the Stairs unduly sentimental. In the end, the narrator realizes that Irene was not just his fantasy but “a woman with a life of her own.” He thinks: “How courageously she had lived it; how timidly I had lived mine.” The lessons are indeed obvious — precisely the ones he needed to learn. But the narrator’s emotional transformation is also poignant, earned, and utterly convincing. The scrim lifts, and, in the language of the heart he now knows, his way forward becomes clear.

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“Here comes Peter Cottontail, hopping down the bunny trail. Hippetty, hoppetty, Easter’s on its way,” so sang cowboy crooner Gene Autry in a hit record of the 1950s. Because of the song, which seemed to be playing anywhere you could find jellybeans, marshmallow Peeps, and candy eggs, I grew up a little confused about rabbits. Was Peter Cottontail another name for the Easter Bunny? Did he have siblings, since my mother sometimes spoke of Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail? And was he the same as this Peter Rabbit I sometimes heard people talk about?

As a child, I never did resolve these questions, partly because no one properly introduced me to Beatrix Potter’s most famous character. Matters actually grew more confused when, in elementary school, I did read about Joel Chandler Harris’s Br’er Rabbit, Howard R. Garis’s Uncle Wiggily, and yet another Peter in Thornton W. Burgess‘s animal stories. Still, of arguably the most popular English children’s book of all time — not a single memory. Neither did I know anything of its author, the subject of Matthew Dennison’s excellent short biography, Over the Hills and Far Away: The Life of Beatrix Potter.

Only as a parent in the 1980s did I finally acquire The Tale of Peter Rabbit and share it with my three young sons at bedtime. In fact, as so often happens with preschoolers, we shared it over and over and over again. Surprisingly, this was no hardship: I was as enchanted as any three-year-old. After all, the book had — has — everything: A daredevil, if slightly neurotic, protagonist, a tragic back-story (“Your father . . . was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor”), the lure of a forbidden paradise, a relentless and murderous adversary, hairbreadth escapes, and, finally, a return to all the warm-lit coziness of home. Who can forget the penultimate picture of Mother Rabbit drawing camomile tea from a big pot suspended over a blazing fire, as her three “good” children look on?

Not least, Potter provided sequels and touches of what those who’ve majored in English would call intertextuality. In The Tale of Benjamin Bunny Peter’s bold cousin lures him, rather reluctantly, back to Mr. McGregor’s garden and further escapades ensue. In The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies we learn that Benjamin married Flopsy and that a grown-up, rather bourgeois Peter now tends his own garden, his days of adventure long behind him. Or are they? In The Tale of Mr. Tod, the two cousins team up again to rescue baby bunnies who have been kidnapped by Tommy Brock the badger. This story begins with one of Potter’s sly jokes: When Peter asks how many bunnies have been taken, Benjamin answers, “Seven, Cousin Peter, and all of them twins!”

Such sly humor, as well as a gentle but pervasive irony, runs through Potter’s work. In The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck children quickly grasp the secret intent of the elegant gentleman with black prick ears and sand-colored whiskers, while the dimwitted but lovable Jemima never does. Similarly, the little girl in The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle only belatedly recognizes that an old washerwoman — who has recently laundered Peter Rabbit’s shrunken blue coat — is actually a hedgehog. Note, too, the visual/verbal humor that opens that brilliantly titled work intended for the very young, The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit. Its first picture depicts what seems a perfectly ordinary, innocent-looking bunny. But then the narrator draws our attention to his “savage whiskers, and his claws, and his turned-up tail.” No doubt about it, only the most naïve and guileless would be taken in by this dangerous, wild beast. In The Pie and the Patty-Pan, set in the Lake District village where she lived, Potter actually turns her hand to French farce, producing a head-spinning comedy of errors. Even Potter’s liking for multisyllabic words and fancy phrases — such as “soporific” and “lamentable want of discretion” — always carries with it a whiff of intended humor. She does, however, avoid surreal nonsense or cruel satire: Her heroes may look like animals, but they are otherwise only human, all too human.

Helen Beatrix Potter was born in 1866 into a well-to-do Victorian family that resided in London. Growing up, she was surrounded by servants, homeschooled by governesses, and kept isolated from the world. She had no friends, except four-legged ones, largely because her parents preferred it that way. So Beatrix lived in her imagination and in the fairy tales and eerie legends she heard from her nannies. “Throughout her life,” notes Matthew Dennison, “she believed in the existence of the Loch Ness monster.”

In adolescence, young Beatrix entertained herself by reading (Walter Scott, Shakespeare, Jane Austen) and keeping a journal, one written in a private cipher so that she could frankly record her observations about art, the world, her family and the animals she kept in her third-floor nursery. “Rabbits are creatures of warm volatile temperament but shallow and absurdly transparent. It is the naturalness, one touch of nature, that I find so delightful in Mr. Benjamin Bunny, though I frankly admit his vulgarity.” In these pages — a good sampling is Beatrix Potter’s Journal, edited by Glen Cavaliero — she gradually perfected what Cavaliero rightly calls “the supple precision” of her prose.

Throughout her teens and twenties Potter was forced to rely on her six-years-younger brother, Bertram, and various rabbits and tamed mice for companionship. Above all, though, she found respite from her straitened, narrow existence in the glorious exaltation of drawing and painting. Art quickly became a compulsion. As Potter once said, “I cannot rest. I must draw, however poor the result.” She was, in fact, both a prodigy and prodigious. Her early subjects, naturally enough, were often her own pets or — when the family was on holiday in the country — insects, farm animals and wildflowers. She worked obsessively to get every detail right, to replicate whatever she observed with the fidelity and accuracy of a scientist. There are, for instance, 250 exceptionally detailed, almost microscopically precise paintings of fungi, i.e., mushrooms and toadstools. By contrast, she always found it difficult to draw people — just compare the bland, doll-faced Lucie in Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle with the vivacious hedgehog.

In 1890 Beatrix bought Mr. Benjamin H. Bouncer, who eventually became the model for Peter Rabbit. Initially, she related Peter’s encounter with Mr. McGregor in a long, illustrated letter to Noel Moore, the five-year-old son of a former governess who was ill in bed, then followed up with a letter to his younger brother about the angling mishaps of the frog, Jeremy Fisher. Years later, she decided to turn Peter’s story into a book, which she had privately published in 1901 at her own expense. This original black-and-white edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit — a first printing of 250 copies, followed by an additional printing of 200 — is now impossibly rare. Somehow, though, this vanity project, this rich girl’s folly, won praise from Arthur Conan Doyle, no less. In 1902 a London publisher, Frederick Warne & Company, then rather cautiously agreed to bring out a commercial edition of the book. By the end of 1903, The Tale of Peter Rabbit had sold 50,000 copies. Today a good copy of the Warne first printing would set you back $20,000.

Potter’s writing career only began in her mid-thirties, at a time when she must have given up on the idea of marriage. Not that she ever repined. “Self containment,” writes Dennison, “was an important facet of her make-up. It surfaces in her fictional characters: Jeremy Fisher, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Mrs. Tittlemouse. All live apparently, fulfilled, largely solitary lives.” But on July 26, 1905, Dennison tells us, Potter reread the end of Persuasion, Jane Austen’s autumnal masterpiece about a woman who, late in life, is unexpectedly given the chance of marital happiness. The previous day, we learn, her editor Norman Warne had proposed to her and she had accepted. He and Potter had worked closely together on a half-dozen books, including her personal favorite, The Tailor of Gloucester, the tiny Dickensian classic, set on Christmas Eve, about how grateful mice unexpectedly repay an act of kindness. She had even used a doll’s house Warne had built as the model for the one in The Tale of Two Bad Mice.

Alas, the engagement was heartbreakingly brief: Warne grew mysteriously ill and suddenly died on August 25th of lymphatic leukemia. In the overromanticized biopic Miss Potter, Renee Zellweger falls to pieces after this tragic death. So did Potter briefly, but as her business letters show, she was always a resolute and tough-minded woman. By October she was back working on The Tale of Jeremy Fisher, which, besides its unlucky hero, features appearances by Mr. Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise and one Sir Isaac Newton (a newt, of course). Determined to make a fresh start, she then moved into a farmhouse in the Lake District.

She didn’t live at Hill Top full time, bowing to the wishes of her parents that she spend stretches with them in London. Still, she visited her farm as often she could and in the next eight years experienced “a sustained burst of intense creativity” that was, as Dennison says, “balanced by her growing knowledge and love of the farmer’s life in the North Country. Between 1905 and 1913, she wrote a clutch of her best-known stories: the tales of Tom Kitten, Jemima Puddle-duck, Samuel Whiskers, Ginger and Pickles, the Flopsy Bunnies, Mrs Tittlemose, Timmy Tiptoes, Mr. Tod and Pigling Bland.” She also composed her whimsical “Miniature Letters,” sent to various children, in one of which Mrs. McGregor threatens to inform the police if Peter keeps trespassing on her property.

Considering how prolific and successful that decade in Potter’s life had been, what happened next may come as something of a surprise: She and William Heelis — her Lake District lawyer and business consultant — grew increasingly fond of each other’s company, and after four years of friendship, were married in 1913. From that date, Beatrix Potter essentially stopped writing. For the next thirty years, until her death at in 1943 at age seventy-seven, she would be Mrs. William Heelis, landowner, sheep breeder, and, above all, preservationist. She yearned to protect the landscape and countryside she loved. “With the ‘little books’ behind her,” writes Dennison, “her focus had shifted. She balanced romance with common sense, and made plans . . . to ensure the long-term survival of her new farms and age-old farming traditions by bequeathing both to the National Trust.”

In a commendable spirit of scholarly camaraderie, Linda Lear, author of the full-length biography Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, praises Over the Hills and Far Away as “brilliantly conceived and beautifully written.” Dennison’s overfondness for semicolons can be a bit tiring, but I would otherwise agree; the book is concise, brisk and consistently interesting, offering just enough detail for most readers. Serious admirers of Peter Rabbit’s creator, however, will want to acquire Leslie Linder’s engrossing History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter, which closely tracks the genesis of each of the little books, as well as its pictorial companion, The Art of Beatrix Potter, organized by Lindner with landscape photographs by his sister Enid Lindner. Almost as essential is Beatrix Potter’s Letters, selected by the current doyenne of Potter studies, Judy Taylor, who has also edited “So I Shall Tell You a Story. . . ,” a collection of essays on Potter by Maurice Sendak, Graham Greene (a brilliant literary analysis), Rumer Godden, and Rosemary Wells, among many others.

As a child I regrettably missed out on Potter but as a grown-up have made up for this with an entire shelf of books by and about her. Open any of her miniature classics as often as you like, they never pall. After all, Potter worked tirelessly on polishing, revising, tightening and improving them, making sure that her perfectly chosen words worked perfectly with her anthropomorphic pictures. And they do. “Her best work,” concludes Dennison, “emerged from a blurring of fancy and close observation.” In many ways, she is the Jane Austen of children’s literature.

One last bit of advice: As far as possible, read the small, squarish volumes designed — by Potter herself — to show text and pictures on facing pages. I recommend those issued in 1987 (and since) because their color is so much brighter and the reproductions crisper. The large album Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter sacrifices the careful artistic rhythm of the originals, though it does offer useful brief introductions to the various stories.

Today, Beatrix Potter’s work unavoidably evokes the bucolic myth of an idyllic pre−World War I England. In “MCMXIV,” his poem about the last days of the Edwardian era, Philip Larkin wrote: “Never such innocence again.” Still, I suspect that Larkin, who chose The Art of Beatrix Potter as one of the five books he would take to a desert island, must have found some connection to that vanished England in Potter’s pictures and stories. Even now how many of us return to her work, as we do to the Sherlock Holmes stories, for comfort and the temporary reassurance that here, at least, things are right with the world. An illusion, no doubt, especially given the number of widows in Potter’s stories. Nonetheless, her art achieves some impossible balance between the winsome and the realistic. She makes you feel happy, even if you’re not a Berkshire beauty named Pig-Wig:

“They ran, and they ran, and they ran down the hill, and across a short cut on level green turf at the bottom, between pebble beds and rushes.

“They came to the river, they came to the bridge — they crossed it hand and hand — then over the hills and far away she danced with Pigling Bland!”

 

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