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Open the Gate: Transactions in A Child's Garden of Verses is the culmination of Dr.Elizabeth Waterston's lifelong fascination with A Child's Garden of Verses, first as a child-listener, then as a mother-reader, and then as an academic-critic. Elizabeth's scholarly appraisal started with a visit to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in the 1960s, where she pored over the handwritten notebooks in which Robert Louis Stevenson (RLS) first jotted drafts of poems for children. She made meticulous notes of the author's tiny edits and drafted a manuscript of her analysis. However, other endeavours took priority during her busy career as a professor and writer and the manuscript languished in the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet.
In her 100th year and looking for a new project, Elizabeth pulled out her file on A Child's Garden of Verses. She decided to revise the manuscript to focus on the first twenty poems written by Robert Louis Stevenson in 1881–82 and came up with the title Open the Gate.
In this, her last book, Elizabeth's insights into RLS's creative process are enriched by references to the poet's handwritten notebooks and her interpretation of how events in his life influenced his poetry. Her analysis includes responses to these poems by his contemporaries and by readers and illustrators in the decades since they were written.
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