Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney
Creating is changing; or, childless cat ladies for the win!
A picture book that isn’t as well known in the UK as it should be is Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney. I was reminded of this book recently in a discussion on Pamela Leavey’s post about lupines (or lupins as we call them in the UK). The message of the book, passed on to young Miss Rumphius (Alice) by her artist grandfather, and then later passed on from the elderly Miss Rumphius to her great-niece (also called Alice), is that ‘you must do something to make the world more beautiful.’1 Pamela’s Substack Words and Pictures is certainly making the world more beautiful.
Miss Rumphius, published in 1982, was based partly on the life of Hilda Hamlin. Like both Hilda Hamlin and Barbara Cooney, Miss Rumphius travels the world before settling to live by the sea in Maine. Unlike Hamlin and Cooney, Miss Rumphius remains single; however, both Hamlin and Cooney were divorced at a time when divorce was far less accepted than it is now. We follow Miss Rumphius from her girlhood at the turn of the 20th c…