Julia Fine: Ghosts of Rebel Children’s Book Authors

A fireplace, a red balloon, a green and ever-darkening room. One of the most popular children’s books of all time, Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon is also one of the strangest. There is no linear story, only a disembodied voice describing a cozy-but-eerie bedroom, where an anthropomorphized rabbit child lies in bed under the watchful eye of “a quiet old lady who was whispering ‘hush.’”

Chicago novelist Julia Fine began reading Goodnight Moon to her newborn son after what she describes as a “traumatic and isolating” postpartum experience, worsened by the pressure society places on mothers to be visibly happy with their babies. Struck by Goodnight Moon’s surreal yet comforting nighttime imagery, Fine sought out a biography of the book’s author and became enthralled with Margaret Wise Brown — a bisexual rabbit hunter whose writing studio, a strikingly out-of-place nineteenth-century farmhouse, can still be seen today in Greenwich Village. Fine learned that Brown was not only a prolific writer, but also a student of progressive early education and an early innovator of “here-and-now” children’s books, which focused more on delivering tactile and haptic information than traditional “once upon a time” plotlines.

But Fine also became fascinated with Brown’s personal life, including her long-term love affair with Blanche Oelrichs, an Upper East Side socialite who wrote plays and poetry under the pen name . In the early ’40s, Oelrichs was