In Mike Nichols’s absorbing and wrenching 2001 film Wit, based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Emma Thompson, as a single, middle-aged woman shut off from those around her, dies slowly, painfully of metastatic ovarian cancer. Stubbornly she clings to life until her onetime mentor and college professor gives her permission to die, not with the words of the poet they’ve both spent a lifetime studying–John Donne–but by reading to her from The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown.

Brown, who summered in Maine all her life, published more than 100 children’s books–each of which has been read time and again to children enthralled by her spare verse, winsome wordplay, and the evocative illustrations.

“The Runaway Bunny is one of the most passionate pieces of writing for children. It’s really about an ambiguous and deeply felt love between two characters,” says Leonard Marcus, the children’s book historian and author of Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened By The Moon.

Amy Gary notes that The Runaway Bunny was based on a medieval ballad that tells of the obsessive love for a man by a woman who vows that if he succeeds in running away from her, she’ll be the flowers on his grave. Gary, who edits and manages the rights to Brown’s unpublished work, discovered a treasure trove of stories locked away in a trunk in Brown’s sister’s barn attic in Vermont in 1990. Since then, she’s published more than a dozen new books by Brown; the most recent of which is The Moon Shines Down. “So many people in the industry call Brown ‘the guru of children’s publishing,’” says Gary. “She had the ability to understand the emotional context and the stages children must go through to become adults,” even though she never had children of her own.