In early September 1948, a year after she rewilded the landscape of literature with Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown watched the love of her life fade to black.

Michael Strange, born Blanche Oelrichs, had cast an instant spell on Margaret — outspoken, sophisticated, and self-possessed, so tall Margaret had to lift her grey-blue eyes to meet the black of Michael’s, her tall frame clad in masculine clothing she herself had designed to cling to her curves, with a musical voice unspooling from her haunting dark beauty, a deep velvet laugh, and a reputation for rarely keeping a promise. In her tight tweed pants and long-tailed blazers and oversized ties, she moved effortlessly through the sea of gloves and lace and whispering society ladies.

When her wealthy family of Austrian royal lineage had found her erotic poetry embarrassing, Blanche had emancipated herself under the male nom de plume, which soon became a stage name as she strode into the theater world as playwright and actress, and eventually swelled into a total persona — the name with which she signed her letters, the name by which her intimates addressed her, the name of her self-image.

In her youth, Blanche had been named the most beautiful woman in Paris. Now, about to turn fifty-eight, Michael Strange was a ghost on a New York stage, her skin sallow, her body emaciated to the size of a child’s after refusing to let her aggressive leukemia keep her from performing.

Margaret and Michael had met seven years earlier. One day on Vinalhaven — the Maine island where Margaret would spend much of her life and write most of her books — she had rowed to a lover’s cottage and found the luscious stranger sunbathing there with her lover. Soon, back in New York, she was surprised to receive a lunch invitation from Michael, who had shown up dressed in fur from head to toe, asking bold questions about her love life while sipping sherry. Margaret was thirty, Michael fifty and on her third unhappy marriage; her latest husband had never read her poetry. Both women were born in the wrong century, bent on bending it to their will; both were accidental radicals, just by living unselfconsciously; both had had affairs with Thomas Wolfe; both were at heart poets more than anything else.

By the middle of the World War, they were lovers; Michael had declared that she had never loved anyone the way she loved Margaret and never would; she had promised to love her until her dying day.

Late one night, Margaret’s phone rang. Michael’s voice poured in, sped up with alarm, imploring her to get into a taxi right away. Her husband had found out about their relationship and, in an era when the diagnostic manual of psychiatry classified same-sex love as a mental illness, was threatening to have her locked away in an asylum. A doctor was on his way to “diagnose” her. With her maid’s help, Michael managed to slip out through the back staircase and into the taxi as Margaret was pulling up.

On the disorienting ride through the New York nocturne, they weighed their options and decided to head to the high-society women’s club Michael frequented. There, she collected herself, phoned her husband to demand a formal apology, then set the wheels in motion for a legal separation.

From this point on, Michael became — to use the modern term, hard-won and ahistorical — Margaret’s partner. Soon, they were living across the hallway from each other, in a pair of twin apartments on the East End, with Margaret part nominal tenant and part unnamed wife as she was quickly becoming one of the country’s most original and beloved children’s book authors.

It was a stormy love that pushed and pulled, but grafted itself onto Margaret’s being. Michael wrote adoring letters and criticized Margaret’s diction at dinner parties. She gave her a golden wishbone necklace and a ring, made her feel like she was too needy, and derided her children’s books as unsophisticated, “silly furry stories,” not Real Literature: an actress and socialite who had not published a poem in a decade and was feeling abandoned by her own muse, deriding one of the most vibrantly creative people of the past century — poet, songwriter, progressive education reformer, author of more than a hundred singularly wondrous books for the young, with which she would earn herself a little red house, a yellow convertible, and the love of millions of children; the author whom the visionary Ursula Nordstrom had no qualms calling her favorite author, despite also publishing Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein, and E.B. White. Even Michael’s pet name for Margaret was laced with this ambivalent mixture of affection and disdain: Bunny-no-good.

And yet nobody ever knows what electrifies the infinite sky between two people, what magnetizes them together, what roils deep beneath the faint surface trails left in letters and diaries and the recollections of bystanders, what animates the long days between the islanded moments crashed by emotion and frozen in time. Margaret loved Michael with unassailable devotion, and Michael was dying. So she did the hardest thing in life — facing the death of a beloved while remaining a pillar for their passage — the best way she knew how: She wrote a love letter in the form of a children’s book.

On the last day of spring in 1950, three years after Goodnight Moon had enraptured the world with its bright playfulness, The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds, somber and numinous with its elegiac prose, and its haunting duotone of otherworldly greens and yellows, and its simple dedication: “For Michael Strange.”

Margaret asked her longtime collaborator Leonard Weisgard — one of the most prolific and beloved picture-book artists of the century — to illustrate it. She urged him to do it as fast as possible in order to rush the book to the printer and press it into Michael’s hands while she was still alive. He agreed out of love for Margaret, but he resented being rushed and did not condone her relationship with Michael. For an artist of such staggering talent and versatility, the unfeeling two-tone illustrations he produced for this layered, lovely book were by far his weakest. They didn’t help the book’s fate, already up against a culture that has no room and no language for grief, and no tolerance for the darkest dimensions of life, which crack open our vastest capacity for light — it fell out of print.

I learned about The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds through a footnote in a volume of Ursula Nordstrom’s letters. Had I not just lost a beloved friend, I might not have gone on the long dusty search for a surviving copy. When I finally found one, I fell instantly under the spell of this crepuscular story aglow with love and longing. It was odd to see such unfeeling illustrations for something so deeply felt. When Marginalian Editions was born of the conviction that the best way to complain is to create, I invited the wildly talented Ofra Amit — who had illustrated my book The Universe in Verse — to reimagine Margaret’s love letter to the mystery of death in a new edition that does justice to the subtlety, strangeness, and splendor of the story, bittersweet and beautiful like the transience of life itself.