If you run away, said his mother, I will run after you. For you are my little bunny.<\/em> In Mike Nichols\u2019s absorbing and wrenching 2001 film Wit<\/em>, 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\u2019ve both spent a lifetime studying\u2013John Donne\u2013but by reading to her from The Runaway Bunny<\/em> by Margaret Wise Brown.<\/p>\n Brown, who summered in Maine all her life, published more than 100 children\u2019s books\u2013each of which has been read time and again to children enthralled by her spare verse, winsome wordplay, and the evocative illustrations.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Runaway Bunny<\/em> is one of the most passionate pieces of writing for children. It\u2019s really about an ambiguous and deeply felt love between two characters,\u201d says Leonard Marcus, the children\u2019s book historian and author of Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened By The Moon<\/em>.<\/p>\n Amy Gary notes that The Runaway Bunny<\/em> 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\u2019ll be the flowers on his grave. Gary, who edits and manages the rights to Brown\u2019s unpublished work, discovered a treasure trove of stories locked away in a trunk in Brown\u2019s sister\u2019s barn attic in Vermont in 1990. Since then, she\u2019s published more than a dozen new books by Brown; the most recent of which is The Moon Shines Down<\/em>. \u201cSo many people in the industry call Brown \u2018the guru of children\u2019s publishing,\u2019\u201d says Gary. \u201cShe had the ability to understand the emotional context and the stages children must go through to become adults,\u201d even though she never had children of her own.<\/p>\n The only home Margaret Wise Brown ever owned was \u201cThe Only House,\u201d an abandoned quarrymaster\u2019s cottage on Vinalhaven she bought in 1943. There she wrote, daydreamed, entertained friends, and lived the island life, as dictated by the season and the sea. \u201cI\u2019ll meet you at the black buoy,\u201d she\u2019d tell friends who\u2019d make the trek to Rockland, then catch a boat ride with obliging islanders. A white cast-iron rabbit greeted visitors by the door. From the living- room windows, they could see the rocky, treed outcropping Margaret wrote about in The Little Island<\/em>.<\/p>\n Like Thompson\u2019s character in Wit<\/em>, Brown died relatively young. In 1952 at just 42, while recovering after surgery, she kicked her foot over her head cancan style to prove how well she was feeling. Heartbeats later, she was dead of an embolism. Her ashes were scattered not far from her tree at the edge of the universe, looking over the water. The rough stone marking the spot is inscribed, \u201cMargaret Wise Brown, writer of Songs and Nonsense.\u201d<\/p>\n A trip to Margaret Wise Brown\u2019s cottage on Vinalhaven still hurts with memories of her early death and what the stylish young author might have done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20843,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[1200],"class_list":["post-20841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classic-maine-stories","tag-winterguide-2009"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20841"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20845,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20841\/revisions\/20845"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u201cA little allegory of the soul,\u201d remarks the elderly former professor, pausing mid-book.<\/em>
\n\u201cWherever it hides, God will find it.\u201d<\/em> \u2013A final scene in Wit, referencing The Runaway Bunny<\/p>\n![\"MWB-WG09-1\"](\"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/02\/MWB-WG09-1-790x1024.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"