When you think of political fiction, authors that spring to mind might include George Orwell (Animal Farm, 1984), or maybe John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath); or perhaps those 19th Century pioneers of social realism, Charles Dickens or Emile Zola, whose work condemnedpoverty and social injustice. Alternatively, feminists among us might cite Angela Carter or Fay Weldon’s eviscerations of patriarchy, or Zadie Smith’s exploration of the shifting landscape of modern multi-cultural London. But I’m guessing that Beatrix Potter would not be at the top of anyone’s list. Take her Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903). The plot is pretty simple. Nutkin is one of a band of red squirrels who regularly visit an island on a lake to forage for nuts. The island is home to an owl named Old Brown, to whom the squirrels bring dead mice and honey. Old Brown receives their tributes in aloof silence and the squirrels are duly deferential, with the exception of Nutkin, who bobs around hyperactively, chanting riddles. Old Brown ignores him, but this merely emboldens Nutkin to step up his impertinence, tickling the owl with a nettle and continuing to bombard him with his infuriating riddles. Eventually, Nutkin crosses a line by jumping onto Old Brown’s head, whereupon the owl grabs the squirrel by his tail and holds him upside down intending to skin him, a fate Nutkin only eludes by pulling free, snapping his tail in two in the process. “And to this day,” concludes the story, “if you meet Nutkin up a tree and ask him a riddle, he will throw sticks at you, and stamp his feet and scold, and shout Cuckcuck-cuck-cur-r-r-cuck-k-k.” Like many stories written for small children this one contains a moral: respect your elders and betters, or else... But it can also be read as a political allegory, a kind of miniature Animal Farm. Old Brown becomes the feudal overlord demanding submission and tribute from the squirrels, whose gifts are a form of tithe. Old Brown does nothing to earn these gifts, and brutally punishes transgressors, like a feathered and taloned mafia boss. Nutkin is the rebel spirit who rejects the meek subservience of his brother squirrels, ending up mutilated and embittered. But even leaving aside allegorical readings, it is not hard to see political dynamics at work in the story, and the listening child will absorb their unspoken message: know your place and behave yourself! Of course, the real power lies not with Old Brown but with Beatrix Potter. The author of any story dictates the narrative and how the story is told. The author can manipulate the reader’s sympathies, withhold information, and play on our emotions. The very word ‘author’, with its roots in authority, denotes power. To write is to exercise power, therefore, to write is a political act. Marxist critics argue persuasively that all literature is political, from the mildest nursery rhyme to the angriest dystopian novel. All literature reflects the assumptions and opinions of the author’s particular worldview: in the case of the Western canon, an overwhelmingly white, male, Judeo-Christian worldview. It reflects the socio-political climate from which it is born. Class hierarchy, social rules and power systems are baked into stories, whether we notice or not. There are no neutral stories or storytellers. Even squirrels are political when they are given fictional identities and quasi-human nature.