This one is imaginary, sort of. The main tale is a story about a girl called Lucie who meets the eponymous washerwoman and discusses the increasingly precarious status of the rural working classes. Or, it’s a fairy tale about a hedgehog. All of Potter’s short stories have great illustrations, obviously, but the language – all the phrases, names, cadences – and the characters (Old Mr. Benjamin Bunny smoking his home-grown!), and sense of place, are wonderful even without the pictures.
And as with the Mariner, it’s a story with a framing device, which comes not at the start but as a footnote at the end: although some people think Lucie must have been dreaming, the narrator demurs: “I have seen that door into the back of the hill called Cat Bells–and besides I am very well acquainted with dear Mrs. Tiggy-winkle!”
The narrator’s engagement with the beyond-the-human has altered her doors of perception, contributed to her intertextual world-building. If you like that sort of thing, Potter is way ahead of the curve. If you just like badly-behaved kittens, she’s also great.
Frederick Warne & Co., 1905
A Personal Anthology 