I always had Beatrix Potter down as an avatar of Home Counties tweeness, with her anti-modern paeans to the countryside and de liddle cuddly animals. So the unsentimental brutalities of this story came as a welcome shock. 'Jemima Puddle-Duck' is as endearingly hopeless as her name suggests, unable to tend her eggs in the overcrowded barn she shares with some supercilious hens. She flies over the forest in search of a suitably solitary spot, and comes across a helpful gentleman dressed in tweed, reading 'The Sporting Times'. He is a fox, and invites her to make use of his summer residence, in particular the shed carpeted with the feathers of previous victims. Dazzled by his good breeding, Jemima accepts his offer and visits daily. When the eggs are about to hatch, Foxy suggests she bring along various goodies so they can have a charming goodbye party...
The unremitting violence in this story does not emanate from where you'd expect, and this clear-eyed vision of the natural order of things, of brute force vs. cunning, takes place in the most idyllic setting yuou can think of, a richly detailed rural England, its hills and plants alive and painted in the most soothing colours. But even this balmy backdrop plays out a cycle of struggle for domination, with spiders eating flies, and various other creatures being horrid to one another.
Written at the turn of the 20th century, just before female emancipation, it's hard not to see the woebegotten Jemima as an image of women's fate in a world run by men, both good and bad, with the fox as parisitic aristo in straitened circumstances, and the dog as paternalistic liberal. Indeed, the whole thing plays like an Emile Zola potboiler disguised as toddler fodder. Upsetting, cruel and marvellous.