Jemima Puddle-Duck

by Beatrix Potter

Overview

The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck is a children's book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter. It was first published by Frederick Warne & Co. in July 1908. Potter composed the book at Hill Top, a working farm in the Lake District she bought in 1905. Following the purchase, her works began to focus on country and village life, incorporating large casts of animal characters and sinister villains. Jemima Puddle-Duck was the first of her books set wholly at the farm with background illustrations based on the farm buildings and yard, and nearby locales.

Jemima is a domestic duck whose eggs are routinely confiscated by the farmer's wife because she believes Jemima a poor sitter. Jemima searches for a place away from the farm where she can hatch her eggs without human interference, and naively confides her woes to a suave fox who invites her to nest in a shed at his home. Jemima accepts his invitation, little realizing her danger: the fox plans to kill and roast her. Kep, a collie on the farm, discovers Jemima's whereabouts and rescues her just in time. Potter indicated the tale was a revision of "Little Red Riding Hood" with Jemima, the fox, and the dog parallels to the fairy tale's heroine, wolf, and woodcutter. Jemima, Kep, the farmer's wife and her two children were all modelled on real world individuals at Potter's Hill Top farm.

The book was hugely popular. Spinoff merchandise included a soft Jemima doll in bonnet and shawl, a Jemima painting book in 1925, and illustrated fabric place mats hand-fashioned by Potter and distributed to friends. Critically, the book is considered one of Potter's best. In 1971, the tale became a segment in the Royal Ballet film, The Tales of Beatrix Potter, and, in 1993, it was telecast as an episode on the animated BBC anthology series, The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940015112733
Publisher:	Balefire Publishing
Publication date:	09/04/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	12
File size:	741 KB
Age Range:	3 - 5 Years

About the Author

Helen Beatrix Potter (28 July 1866 – 22 December 1943) was an English author, illustrator, natural scientist and conservationist best known for her imaginative children’s books featuring animals such as those in The Tale of Peter Rabbit which celebrated the British landscape and country life.

Born into a privileged Unitarian family, Potter, along with her younger brother, Walter Bertram (1872–1918), grew up with few friends outside her large extended family. Her parents were artistic, interested in nature and enjoyed the countryside. As children, Beatrix and Bertram had numerous small animals as pets which they observed closely and drew endlessly. Summer holidays were spent in Scotland and in the English Lake District where Beatrix developed a love of the natural world which was the subject of her painting from an early age.

She was educated by private governesses until she was eighteen. Her study of languages, literature, science and history was broad and she was an eager student. Her artistic talents were recognized early. Although she was provided with private art lessons, Potter preferred to develop her own style, particularly favoring watercolor. Along with her drawings of her animals, real and imagined, she illustrated insects, fossils, archeological artefacts, and fungi. In the 1890s her mycological illustrations and research on the reproduction of fungi spores generated interest from the scientific establishment. Following some success illustrating cards and booklets, Potter wrote and illustrated The Tale of Peter Rabbit publishing it first privately in 1901, and a year later as a small, three-color illustrated book with Frederick Warne & Co. She became unofficially engaged to her editor Norman Warne in 1905 despite the disapproval of her parents, but he died suddenly a month later, of leukemia.

With the proceeds from the books and a legacy from an aunt, Potter bought Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey, a tiny village in the English Lake District near Ambleside in 1905. Over the next several decades, she purchased additional farms to preserve the unique hill country landscape.