BY G. CONNOR SALTER

Betty Aberlin is known to many fans for her acting, particularly for her work playing Lady Aberlin on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood from 1968-2001, work on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, various supporting roles in Kevin Smith’s films, and her extensive work in New York theatre on and off Broadway (including the musicals Yours, Anne and Getting My Act Together and Taking It On the Road). She has discussed her work with author William V. Madison and with Wayne-Daniel Berard for Soul-Lit, on the TV show Beyond Vaudeville, on WSKG Public Radio, and on the podcast SMinterview with Kevin Smith.

What many of her fans do not know is that Aberlin is also a painter whose work has been displayed at MURAL on Main and a writer who has contributed poetry and creative nonfiction to such publications as Fowl Feather Review, Fresh Yarn, and Soul-Lit. Along with the many awards she received as a cast member of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, she also received the Hunter Mountain Lifetime Achievement Award from the Hunter Mountain Film Festival in 2020.

While Aberlin continues to write and release poetry, her best-known poetic work is The Diary of an Old Soul and the White Page Poems.

The book serves as a companion to a collection of devotional poems that George MacDonald published in 1880 as A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul. The work features an unusual dedication, explaining why the book only has poems written on one side of the page:

Sweet friends, receive my offering. You will find

Against each worded page a white page set:

This is the mirror of each friendly mind

Reflecting that. In this book we are met.

Make it, dear hearts, of worth to you indeed:

Let your white page be ground, my print be seed,

Growing to golden ears, that faith and hope shall feed.

Aberlin’s work takes up that invitation and combines the original text with her own poems, one for each day of the year. The Diary of an Old Soul and the White Page Poems was published by Robert Trexler’s Winged Lion Press with poet Daniel Berrigan endorsing it as “an awesome collection and collaboration,” scholar Don King calling it “fresh and incisive,” and author Luci Shaw highlighting Aberlin for “her poetic gifts and spiritual intelligence.”

The book has made its way into George MacDonald scholarship, with scholars like J. Patrick Pazdziora highlighting how it engages MacDonald’s themes.

Betty was kind enough to answer a few questions.

Interview Questions

MacDonald’s bicentennial happened recently and he seems to be undergoing a renaissance, but it was not that long ago that he was a niche topic mostly known to fans of the Inklings or to scholars working on Victorian culture. How did you first hear about George MacDonald?

Fred McFeely Rogers, a Presbyterian minister, first mentioned him to me. I had devoured all MacDonald’s novels, save the two I was unable to enter (Lilith and Phantastes) and I can only say by grace, I happened upon MacDonald’s invitation to the reader in The Wingfold group online community, and accepted it.[1]

What appealed to you about his poetry?

I had no preconception of his poetry as poetry; did not seek to critique it. Here was a person I by now trusted, who might open meaning to me, and he had invited me to respond to him in a “book of strife in the form of a diary of an Old Soul” in which he was pouring out his heart and mind on subjects such as love, faith and loss. I only hoped to understand what he was saying and from my own very different background, nature, time and place to attempt to reply—to keep the communication going beyond the “finite.”

What made you decide to take another step, not just read MacDonald’s poetry, but also respond to it by writing your own?

When I saw his invitation to the reader, which was the prelude to his 1880 Diary of an Old Soul, it happened to be close to the beginning of the year 2005. My online community was encouraging, and I began to share my first responses with them. I owe them a great deal, not least because Robert Trexler was a member, and he offered to publish the work after I had been at it every day for about a year and a half.

I just followed the bread-crumbs into the mystery of this next MacDonald book, although I was not sure I was cut out to respond in poetry, because a well-meaning teacher had given me a back-handed compliment when I was sixteen, which I took literally (“Cousin Betty, You will never be a poet,” Dryden’s pronouncement on the works of his cousin Jonathan Swift). I answered in prose for the first three days, and then began to respond in poetry, after having written only furtively in that form for many years. (So much for higher education!)

It’s not uncommon to find our feelings about a writer adjust as we study their work and respond to it. Did your feelings about MacDonald as a writer change as you worked on the book?

Truly I was not studying his work, I felt we were in a conversation which confirmed the reality of his eternal ongoing being. I am remembering something he wrote—something like: “Oh you who live, now answer dying me”—so that after a fashion, daily communion with his great spirit gave me a window into the ongoing infinite beyond and his living existence there which, met by my present-day “strife,” might offer him a personal “we are met” in our own earthly reality as we in the here and now went about our simultaneous living and dying.

I have no feelings about him “as a writer” save massive gratitude for what he was able to impart to me regarding that which is beyond words. If he inspired C.S. Lewis to write Till We Have Faces (my favorite of all myths when I was a child) and to honor him as a character in The Great Divorce, I am only more in his debt, as these were two of my favorites by Lewis.

How have readers responded to the book compared to your other work?

The only responses I have read to The White Page Poems are online. Daniel Berrigan’s words of appreciation were better than an imprimatur! Several readers have taken me up on my invitation to continue to interact with his poems. Live theater (unlike film and television) is a place where you can actually receive an immediate reaction to one’s work. I recently experienced the bliss both of seeing a staged reading of my one-act play, Annie and Zoe, and of hearing from the audience who had stayed to discuss it afterwards. The event was wonderful, illuminating and uplifting. I may have missed my calling as a playwright. This is what happens when one is in love with all the arts. Readers and audience members, being unique, have unique responses.

You have described taking a journey from “post-Holocaust orthodox Jewish atheism” to embracing “some form of Christianity, heartened by Edith Stein/Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, Cardinal Lustiger and Simone Weil” and making more discoveries as your faith develops. Do you find your journey gives you a different perspective on MacDonald when you talk with other fans of his work?

Those “dipped in the wick” of a faith denomination as children, who as they grow may deepen that religious practice or abandon/grow out of it toward the light of another path may indeed have a different perspective on MacDonald’s or any other manifestly Christian writer’s work—than those, for example, living today in Gaza or Ukraine, or starving in Africa—who may call out to a living God for mercy and conclude that He does not hear them or does not exist. My perspective on these mysteries beyond words are only my own. I am not an expert on anything but my own “unknowingness.” I was surprised to begin to believe in the real existence of a living Being, and very reluctant to seek nourishment in any category other than any that my DNA might reveal. When I first realized that Jesus was a Jew you could have knocked me over with a feather.

Timothy Larsen comments in his introduction to a 2024 edition of Diary of an Old Soul that MacDonald is often called a mystic. Any thoughts on that? Do you think of MacDonald as a mystic?

He probably is. I think of him as good, kind, witty, profound, original and wise.

You have also mentioned your admiration for C.S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers. What are some things that you have enjoyed about their work?

I don’t really know the work of Dorothy Sayers. I am glad that the Inklings let any woman into their sacred writing circle, and guess that my sister-in-conversion, poet Joy Davidman, did not enjoy a comparable welcome, although I am certain she inspired the character of Orual.  The works Lewis wrote following her death and his inscription on her grave give me great hope for the reality of true love itself.  C.S. Lewis helped me to justify the possibility that I was free to look beyond my own identity as a fatherless “nice-Jewish-girl” who had to justify her life by works (or Anne Frank had died a martyr for nothing) and who could not relate to any God-the-Father entity.  He, as was the case with Dorothy Day, had moved from a kind of indifference or skepticism into quite another realm, and I was keenly interested in that realm and their experiences within it.

Many people know you for your work on Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, which means you have rich experience telling stories for children. Any thoughts on MacDonald as a children’s storyteller?

My favorites of his are The Light Princess, The Day Boy and The Night Girl, and Gifts of the Child Christ. He is without peer in putting the very seed of Christianity in a nutshell though he had some very spiffy peers. And he was able to let his whimsy flag fly, as Fred Rogers, circumscribed by the mandates of child developmental theories and the necessities of serving children of all (and no) faiths on PBS television, was not, saving perhaps in his 13 “operas” for children.

Not many people know that MacDonald was friends with Lewis Carroll, and read an early draft of Alice in Wonderland to his children. You have engaged with Alice in Wonderland as a performer, playing Alice’s sister in Elizabeth Swados’ musical Alice in Concert and the TV movie Alice at the Palace. Were you aware at the time that MacDonald played a crucial role in Carroll’s work?

No, and I was thrilled to hear of it!

Has your engagement with MacDonald affected how you think about Carroll?

I loved the Wonderland books, and if Macdonald’s children had not loved them, would we ever have seen them? As a child, I read as many fairy tales and myths as I could, and Hans Christian Andersen’s stories probably planted the first seeds of faith within me. Although as a very young girl, playing in my grandparents’ yard, and making a tiny landscape with a shard of cobalt glass and some pebbles, I distinctly heard the words, “as above, so below.” This happened to be the title of the recent evening in which my one-act play was read, so…[2]

Any upcoming projects you’d like to tell people about?

It’s so lovely to be “taken seriously” as anyone other than the character I played in a children’s program, which appropriated my stepfather’s last name (Aberlin) and kind of subsumed me, though I am ever so grateful to have meant for others even a bit of what Fran Allison (Kukla, Fran and Ollie), Leslie Caron (Lilli) and Moira Shearer (The Red Shoes) meant to me as a child. I have had the joy of returning to live theater, playing a wonderful comic part in the David Lindsay-Abaire play, Good People, and another in a reading of The Willows, a new play by Sharyn Rothstein.  I am looking forward to such “little old lady” parts as may come my way, to publishing a collection of my poetry and short fiction, and having still some time, in this rising tide of ongoing conversion from despair into hope, to make more art and to learn how to be more loving. All my life people have told me I was “too sensitive” or “too serious.” I literally “was a poet and didn’t know it” thanks in childhood to Gilbert and Sullivan, A.A. Milne and William Blake.

Is there, in these times, such a thing as being “too serious”? A friend simplified it for me. “Betty,” he said: “We’re Slavs.”

More information about Betty Aberlin’s work can be found on her Facebook page.

[1] Interviewer’s Note: Wingfold was one of various communities and publications devoted to George MacDonald, taking the name from his 1876 novel Thomas Wingfold, Curate.

[2] Interviewer’s Note: “As Above, So Below” was hosted by the Doctorow Center for the Arts in Hunter, New York, on May 7, 2025, and included Elisabeth Henry and Jessica Gibbons performing Annie and Zoe.