Picture Book Monday: Only Opal
Feb. 9th, 2026 08:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI was quite excited about the picture book Only Opal: The Diary of a Young Girl, as I’ve been low-key obsessed with Opal Whiteley for years, and what could be better than a book about Opal illustrated by Barbara Cooney?
For those of you who don’t know, Opal Whiteley came to national attention in 1920 when the Atlantic Monthly published her childhood diary, in which young Opal wrote lyrical descriptions of nature and her animal friends, who have Lars Porsenna (the crow) and Brave Horatius (the dog). Some people were and remain bowled over by the beauty of her nature writing. Other people accused Opal of making up the diary wholesale. Would any kid really name a crow Lars Porsenna? It’s just too too precious.
I believe that the diary was real, though. Opal was an extremely bright child, and extremely bright children sometimes do things that strike people who don’t know them as completely unbelievable. She also suffered from a very unfortunate accident of timing, in that she fit perfectly a cultural archetype that was just coming under attack when she published her diary. A child of Nature, growing up in poverty but learning from the trees and the flowers and a few good, solid books (traditionally the Bible and Shakespeare, but in Opal’s case a book of historical figures).
After World War I this whole “child of nature” idea came to be seen as an offshoot of a sickeningly naive vision of human nature that had been exploded by the war. And then here comes Opal Whiteley, presenting to the world this diary supposedly written when she was five and six, which completely embodies this discredited vision. Well, it’s much easier to say “She’s a fraud!” than to wonder “Is there something in the child of nature idea after all?”
Unfortunately, as I recalled as I began to read the picture book, although I find Opal as a person very interesting, I can’t stand her diary. I think it’s a real diary, truly written by Opal as a child, but even in the immensely abridged form of a picture book, it does strike me as too too precious. “One way the road does go to the house of the girl who has no seeing” - good gravy, Opal, just say she’s blind. You named a mouse Felix Mendelssohn! I know you know the word blind!
But of course Barbara Cooney’s illustrations are lovely as always. I particularly liked the picture of the mouse Felix Mendelssohn asleep on a pincushion under a little square of flannel. Just the right level of precious.
For those of you who don’t know, Opal Whiteley came to national attention in 1920 when the Atlantic Monthly published her childhood diary, in which young Opal wrote lyrical descriptions of nature and her animal friends, who have Lars Porsenna (the crow) and Brave Horatius (the dog). Some people were and remain bowled over by the beauty of her nature writing. Other people accused Opal of making up the diary wholesale. Would any kid really name a crow Lars Porsenna? It’s just too too precious.
I believe that the diary was real, though. Opal was an extremely bright child, and extremely bright children sometimes do things that strike people who don’t know them as completely unbelievable. She also suffered from a very unfortunate accident of timing, in that she fit perfectly a cultural archetype that was just coming under attack when she published her diary. A child of Nature, growing up in poverty but learning from the trees and the flowers and a few good, solid books (traditionally the Bible and Shakespeare, but in Opal’s case a book of historical figures).
After World War I this whole “child of nature” idea came to be seen as an offshoot of a sickeningly naive vision of human nature that had been exploded by the war. And then here comes Opal Whiteley, presenting to the world this diary supposedly written when she was five and six, which completely embodies this discredited vision. Well, it’s much easier to say “She’s a fraud!” than to wonder “Is there something in the child of nature idea after all?”
Unfortunately, as I recalled as I began to read the picture book, although I find Opal as a person very interesting, I can’t stand her diary. I think it’s a real diary, truly written by Opal as a child, but even in the immensely abridged form of a picture book, it does strike me as too too precious. “One way the road does go to the house of the girl who has no seeing” - good gravy, Opal, just say she’s blind. You named a mouse Felix Mendelssohn! I know you know the word blind!
But of course Barbara Cooney’s illustrations are lovely as always. I particularly liked the picture of the mouse Felix Mendelssohn asleep on a pincushion under a little square of flannel. Just the right level of precious.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-09 02:08 pm (UTC)People do things like embrace the-child-of-Nature narrative, and then they excoriate it. I feel like the energy that goes into the excoriation is probably directly proportional to the degree the idea was held up as the cure for everything, the One Neat Trick.
And yeah, I couldn't stand the diary either.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-09 03:01 pm (UTC)Re: the diary, I know we've spoken about struggling with certain kinds of nature writing, and Opal Whiteley's diary perfectly embodies the kind of nature writing I dislike. She's not so much observing nature as rhapsodizing about how nature makes her feel, and she's doing it in a style that I find very affected and cutesy. (And then I feel bad for criticizing the diary of a lonely five-year-old, but listen, she was no longer a lonely five-year-old when she published it.)
no subject
Date: 2026-02-09 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-09 10:08 pm (UTC)I will say that part of why this fascinated me so much is that, while obviously not to THAT degree, I had some similarities to her in my background - I was a precocious, home-schooled child who learned to read and write early, and wrote a lot when I was young - and I can definitely see why people think the diary is a fake, not because a child that age can't write like that, but because I would've expected it to change a *lot* in style and vocabulary from the start to the end. Kids that age change so fast, and you can definitely see that in the stuff I was copiously writing from about age 5 to 8. So basically I read the first couple of chapters and then skipped to the end, not to prove she's a fraud but to see what those changes looked like in her, because I was curious - from how well she writes in the early pages, I would've expected her to be basically to adult vocabulary and phrasing by the end, and instead it was exactly the same, and that made me go "... huh" because that's very much not my experience of how that works in a child that age.
All children are different, though, obviously!
(The fact that she and the editor start off the Gutenberg copy with an introduction that explains how she was a French orphan adopted by loggers who named her after their dead baby and pretended she was their real child, and unconsciously picked up French vocabulary from her previous parents that she used to use without understanding where it came from, but also spelled perfectly in her diary, does not really help ....)
I mean, I'm obviously not saying that I have any way of knowing if she wrote it at that age or not, or if she did write it and then massaged/rewrote it as an adult knowing it would be read by an adult audience, or what - if nothing else, she clearly *was* a very intelligent and precocious child just to have been where she was at that age ... but this did send me off on a tangent of reading articles about her to see what else is known about her and what sort of life she might have had. If nothing else, it made for a fascinating morning! She'd make a very interesting literary character.
Tangential but related, there's another book that you might find interesting along these lines, and that's one I read as a kid as a random used copy that is probably long out of print about Barbara Newhall Follett, a precocious child whose parents preserved her childhood writings - it's called "Barbara: Unconscious Autobiography of a Child Genius"; I looked up the name to refresh my memory on what her actual name was - and I found it absolutely fascinating when I read it as a tween or teen. She's a bit similar to Opal - vaguely similar time frame, wrote a lot about nature and fairies and other early childhood experiences - but in her case, her parents supported her and kept all the stuff she'd written. And you very much do see that kind of change there; IIRC, it's really evident that what Barbara is writing at 5 is not what she's capable of writing at 8 or 9, and interesting to watch her ability to conceptualize things with language change over time. (Based on my recollections anyway; I'd love to find another copy of that book someday.)
Anyway - fun morning, glad to find out about her!
no subject
Date: 2026-02-10 02:23 pm (UTC)Opal later revealed that she believed that her real parents were a French prince and his wife, who died on an exploring expedition in India. Unclear how Opal believed that she got from India to a logging camp in the Pacific Northwest. I think it's pretty widely accepted that this aspect of her story is a delusion - she spent the last few decades of her life in an institution - and later writers also tend to doubt that she was orphaned at all, but believe that she was in fact the Whiteley's blood daughter.
The thing I find so striking about Opal's diary is that grammatically it's so similar to the way that Sheila speaks in One Child. Sheila was also an immensely precocious child from a traumatic background, also around six years old, and had the same verbal tics of peppering her speech with extra "be"s and "do"s, in a setting where no one else in her family talks that way.
Yes, I'm also fascinated by Barbara Newhall Follett! She actually has a tag (here); I ought to have an Opal tag too, but going back through my entries to find the Opal entries seems a bit overwhelming.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-10 08:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-10 02:27 pm (UTC)