It was an interesting commission, to take the 1922 children’s classic The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams and explore its enduring lessons for life, relevant not only for the children for whom the story was first written, but also for those grown-up children we become.

The result is Velveteen Rabbit’s Life Lessons, the original text with an exploration of the key ideas expressed through its gentle storytelling — how we become real and move towards authenticity, the value of resilience, the enduring power of love, the wisdom that can come with age, the joy and fun of friendship, the acceptance of loss.

Williams knew about loss. Born in London in 1881, she was seven when her father suddenly died. Then, in her 40s and a mother herself, living in the US she wrote The Velveteen Rabbit. It was originally commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar magazine in 1921, to accompany illustrations by her child prodigy of an artist daughter Pamela Bianco, and billed as a ‘fairy story for grown-ups’, its universal themes resonating with a generation that had lost so much from the 1918 flu epidemic and WW1.

The following year the story appeared in book form, with illustrations by the well-known British artist William Nicholson, and became an instant classic. The book has been in print in various incarnations ever since, beloved by generations and showing up in popular culture from time to time — the 1988 film Mystic Pizza, and in two episodes of Friends — it was Chandler’s favourite children’s book.

There’s a reason why children still find its story holds good. At its heart the story addresses the idea of what it means to be real but it’s also about negotiating the early lessons of life. The velveteen rabbit is a Christmas gift to a small boy, who loves and cherishes him. Some of the other modern, clockwork toys are condescending and snub him, which he finds hurtful, while insisting they are Real and he is not. In the nursery he is befriended by the wise Skin Horse, to whom he asks, ‘What is Real?’ and is told that becoming real takes time and by the time it happens, ‘...most of your hair has become loved off [...] you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people that don’t understand.’

As professor of psychology Bruno Bettelheim wrote in his 1976 book, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, ‘The child intuitively comprehends that although these stories are unreal, they are not untrue …’ and as children, through fantasy and imagination, we learn truths about our feelings and experience and here, through the telling of this story, what it means to become real begins to take shape.

And through this story the value of resilience and kindness, the importance of authenticity, and that true acceptance comes from self-acceptance, becomes gently apparent. In Jungian terms, it’s the process of individuation that occurs as we mature towards adulthood, the integration of the conscious and unconscious parts of our psyche, discovering and accepting ourselves in a process of becoming ‘real’, just like the velveteen rabbit, attaining the authenticity that enables us to live well-balanced lives.

‘The mission of fantasy, far from belying truth, is often to present truth in an understandable form,’ wrote Williams in 1929, and her insights about this process lie at the heart of the story of The Velveteen Rabbit. Working on this, pondering on its life lessons during a time of geopolitical turmoil and socioeconomic stress for so many, it was curiously life-enhancing to pause and reconsider some of the universal truths about love and resilience and magic enshrined in a century old children’s story.

Velveteen Rabbit’s Life Lessons by Harriet Griffey, illustrated by Emma Carlisle, is published by Rizzoli, price £14.95