The Bittersweet Announcement of a New Beatrix Potter Book

Beatrix Potter’s original illustration of Kitty-in-Boots.Illustration Courtesy Frederick Warne Co. / the Victoria and Albert Museum

“I do not draw cats well,” Beatrix Potter complained to her publisher in 1916, at the age of fifty, after having been a celebrated author for more than a dozen years, with almost twenty published works to her name. She was rationalizing her abandonment of a half-completed work, “The Sly Old Cat,” which she had begun a decade earlier. Posterity overruled Potter’s misgivings: in 1971, “The Sly Old Cat” was published, and it’s included in the authorized edition of her complete works, given as “a delightful example of the liveliness and spontaneity that characterized Potter’s preliminary work.”

Last week, Penguin Random House announced that it will publish another “lost” Potter work about a cat: “The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots,” which she had begun and abandoned two years earlier, in 1914. Several manuscripts of the story were discovered in 2013 in the Potter archive at the Victoria & Albert Museum by Jo Hanks, a publisher at Penguin Random House; the book is being published this fall to coincide with the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Potter’s birth.

According to Penguin Random House, Potter’s intention to publish the story is evident: the archive included a version that had been set in type, suggesting that its publication was once quite far along. In a letter to her publisher, Harold Warne, Potter characterized the principal character as “a well-behaved black Kitty cat, who leads rather a double life, and goes out hunting with a little gun on moonlight nights, dressed up like puss in boots.” Linda Lear, Potter’s biographer, writes that Warne was lukewarm about the proposal, however, and suggests that this lack of enthusiasm led to Potter’s abandonment of the book after she had completed only some sketches and had begun just one color illustration. This image, the projected frontispiece, shows a black, green-eyed cat wearing a hunting jacket, britches, and boots. In one paw, she is grasping a limp, indeterminate trophy—a pheasant, perhaps—while supporting a rifle with the other.

The image is sketchy-looking, but vigorous, and it suggests that if the book had been finished, Kitty-in-Boots would have been a worthy member of Potter’s feline pantheon. So does the summary of the plot thus far released, which reveals that Kitty-in-Boots calls herself “Miss Catherine Saint Quintin,” that she sports a Norfolk jacket—picture Lord Grantham’s weekend wardrobe—and wears fur-lined boots. (One can’t help but wonder—the fur of which animal?) Still more appealing is the fact that she enjoys being mistaken for a man—as she is by Mrs. Tiggywinkle, who makes a cameo appearance. It may have taken a century for Kitty-in-Boots to surface, but there can be no better time than today, the age of “Transparent,” for a gender-binary-defying cat to materialize.

Potter included cats in many of her works, and the consistency of their characterization underlines her particular genius: the way in which she uses anthropomorphized creatures to examine human nature, while also maintaining a perceptive understanding of what makes animals irreducibly animal. The first Potter cat appears in her earliest book, “The Tale of Peter Rabbit.” An unnamed white cat, she is observing some goldfish in the pond of Mr. McGregor’s garden—into which Peter has trespassed and inside which he is now trapped. The illustration shows the cat looking intently downward, the tip of her tail turned slightly up, as if in an involuntary twitch. “Peter thought it best to go away without speaking to her,” Potter writes. “He’d heard about cats from his cousin, little Benjamin Bunny.” Potter does not elaborate upon exactly what it is that Peter has heard from Benjamin, whose own adventures, foreshadowed here, will be the subject of a later book. But the humor of the line lies in Potter’s assumption that her readers will be in common agreement about some verities of feline nature: that cats are selfish, unpredictable, ill-tempered, unhelpful, and possibly violent.

In subsequent works, Potter’s cats are, almost without exception, objectionable in recognizably feline ways. In the “The Tailor of Gloucester,” Potter’s third book and her expressed favorite among all her works, there is Simpkin, an irascible tabby who has imprisoned several mice under various items of crockery, and who spits and growls at the tailor after the latter inadvertently releases them. (While the tailor is sleeping, Simpkin “made strange horrid noises, as cats do at night.”) In “The Tale of the Pie and the Patty Pan,” Ribby, feline, invites her friend Duchess, canine, to tea, and, utterly careless of her guest’s tastes, prepares mouse pie. “The Tale of Ginger and Pickles” features Ginger, a yellow-tabby tomcat who, despite being a shopkeeper, prefers not to serve the mice who enter his store, “because he said it made his mouth water.”

We have a word—dogged—to describe the dedicated fixation of canine attention. But we lack a word to capture the patient, relentless siege-holding of which a cat is capable, and which is captured by Potter in “The Tale of Benjamin Bunny.” There, a cat plants herself atop an overturned basket under which Peter and Benjamin have hidden, and watches the basket’s narrow opening, fixedly. (In this respect, Potter’s heirs include True Kelley, the illustrator of Sara Swan Miller’s masterwork, “Three Stories You Can Read To Your Cat.” It shows a cat waiting for a bug to emerge from a hiding place: “I can wait,” it reads. “I can wait forever.”) Instead, we have the word “catty”—or, more obscurely, “cattish,” or “cat-witted”—to mean spiteful and small-minded.

“Catty” is a word most commonly associated with speech; Potter’s cats, meanwhile, are mostly silent and inscrutable, like their real-life counterparts. They do, however, tend toward cattishness. One notable exception appears in the last of Potter’s completed animal tales, “The Tale of Little Pig Robinson,” a quasi-fairy tale in which a ship’s pig, unaware that he is being fattened for a forthcoming feast, is assisted in his escape by the ship’s cat. The cat’s actions, Potter writes, are “actuated partly by unselfish friendship, and partly by a grudge against the cook and Captain Barnabus Butcher.” This unusually humane gesture has a feline motivation, too.

As the critic April Bernard noted in an essay last year, the popular charm of Potter’s artistry has meant that her clear-eyed depiction of nature’s darker truths is easily overlooked. (“The Tale of Miss Jemima Puddle-Duck,” sometimes taken to be a comic story about a duck’s gullibility, is in fact a horrific narrative of malevolent seduction, and of maternal struggle in the face of brutal gang violence. Its final lines point toward what today would be diagnosed as P.T.S.D.) Nature is unmistakably red in tooth and claw in Potter’s work, even if her illustrations are never actually gory. Instead, she reminds her readers of animals’ peculiar sensitivities: her work is rich with references to how things smell, for instance. Her creatures, while observing some social niceties—many, though not all, of them wear clothes—nonetheless inhabit their instinctual destinies. When Tom Kitten, another of Potter’s unruly cats, is taken hostage by some rats in “The Tale of Samuel Whiskers,” Potter unflinchingly draws him suffering his fate: tied up, then smeared with butter, and finally rolled up inside a tube of pastry, ready for the oven.

Despite her demurral, Potter did draw cats well: “The Tale of Samuel Whiskers” and “The Tale of Tom Kitten” both feature multiple images that capture cats’ playfulness, inscrutability, and heartlessness: the trinity of feline personality traits. “The Story of Miss Moppet,” a book about a wide-eyed kitten’s foiled pursuit of a mouse, in which Miss Moppet attempts to beguile her prey into coming within paw’s reach by tying her own head up in a duster, pretending to be ill—perfectly conveys the essential humorlessness of the feline. Potter is masterful at catching the occasional air of stupidity, the foolishness by way of aloofness, that means the observation of cats can be a cruel kind of entertainment. Her illustrations are prescient precursors of the Internet’s inexhaustibly rich supply of cat pictures: LOLcats of the Edwardian age.

According to Hanks, Kitty-in-Boots is cattishly consistent: “What Potter did with the character of Kitty is that she emphasized her primal cat nature,” she said, by phone from London. Kitty’s fondness for hunting is an extension of what cats like to do, given their druthers. “Cats think a lot of themselves, and Kitty does, too, and it is typical of Potter to hone in on the part we find so amusing,” Hanks continued. Kitty’s haughtiness leads to her getting her comeuppance. Peter Rabbit, older and stouter, is involved, and fans will be relieved to learn that there are no Atticus-Finch-like revelations—no blights of myxomatosis, no catastrophic burrowing incidents—about the later years of this beloved character.

“The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots” will be published this fall, by Penguin Random House, to coincide with the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Potter’s birth, and will feature new illustrations by Quentin Blake.

Illustration by Quentin Blake

But the discovery of “The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots” is nonetheless a bittersweet one. However welcome a new work is, it seems unlikely that a book written by Beatrix Potter that lacks illustrations by Beatrix Potter can be entirely satisfying. Penguin Random House commissioned Quentin Blake, the celebrated illustrator best known for his work on the books of Roald Dahl, to illustrate the blank pages; Blake “brings his own anarchic charm to Kitty, and embellishes her,” Hanks said. Blake’s scratchy, cartoonish drawing style could not be further from Potter’s precisely observed hypernaturalism. He has been known to draw cats that are smiling, an expression absent in Potter, and rare in feline nature. (The cat-that-got-the-cream face sometimes seen on contented cats might be better characterized as smirking, or gloating.) Still, the gulf between his work and Potter’s is a very deliberate choice: Hanks says no consideration was given to hiring an artist who might execute a pastiche, such as Eleanor Taylor, whose faithful Potteresque interpretations grace the pages of three recent “Peter Rabbit” spin-offs, written by the actress Emma Thompson.

Potter herself might have been pleased by the substitution. When writing to her publisher about setting aside “The Sly Old Cat,” she suggested that the illustrator Ernest Aris, a lesser rival, be commissioned to finish it for her. “His plagiarisms are unblushing, and his drawings excellent,” she said of Aris, perhaps with a hint of cattiness in the observation. Later, she changed her favorable opinion of Aris, after he included a rabbit named Peter in one of his books, then pretended not to know of “Peter Rabbit” when challenged, and proposed that Potter send him a signed copy. Quentin Blake shows no such posthumous audacity. In a quiet tribute to Potter, the unnamed owner of Kitty-in-Boots is drawn to resemble the author herself.