My grandfather, the children's book author and essayist E.B. White, once wrote:

The critic leaves at curtain fall,
To find, in starting to review it,
He scarcely saw the play at all
For watching his reaction to it.

Viewing the new Paramount Pictures movie of "Charlotte's Web" on its release day, I knew just how that critic felt. I am sometimes asked, by very young children in Maine, whether I am the granddaughter of Stuart Little. The question makes me laugh and, of course, it makes me feel very proud – and very little. I only wish a couple of those children had come with me to the movie, so I could have been watching their reactions instead of mine.

"Charlotte's Web" readers mostly want to know whether I have ever killed a spider. (Hasn't everyone?)

Occasionally, girls ask if Fern was modeled after me. She was not, but the math can be difficult. While children have no trouble believing that I'm 52, they are loath to think that Fern is now 54. My girlhood home was within biking distance of E.B. White's farm, so I visited his barnyard often, especially when there were new lambs or goslings or chicks. I gathered eggs, and helped in the gardens, and even shared the rope swing with my brothers, but I never saved a pig.

I once helped to right an injustice, by digging worms for an abandoned baby robin that my grandfather had adopted, but no spider ever wrote about it.

My grandmother had a word for people who made too much fuss about E.B. White. She'd complain that they were "jammy." Likewise, for years, when asked what he was really like, I'd say, "What was your grandfather like?"

I remember being puzzled when he gave me "Stuart Little" when I was eight, because I'd already read it. It may have been when I started high school and he gave me "The Elements of Style," signing it, "with love from Grandpa (and you can use all the needless words you want to)" that I caught my first glimmer of the writer in the family.

These days, around the time of the winter solstice, my family traditionally tucks a few fir boughs around the slate headstones of my grandparents, E.B. and Katharine S. White. This year, small plastic pigs and spiders had been left on the stones by previous visitors. The pigs are bright pink and one spider is blue, perhaps reflecting that Hollywood has visited the barnyard once again.

In a 1981 letter, recalling an earlier, cartoon version of "Charlotte's Web," E.B. White wrote, "After listening to Wilbur sing 'I Can Talk, I Can Talk,' in the Hanna-Barbera picture, I can take anything. I wanted to run on my sword but couldn't find it...."

How would White have liked this season's version, a reviewer from USA Today wanted to know?

The movie poster promised: "This Christmas, Help Is Coming From Above," and showed Wilbur the pig staring up at a moonlit web. My grandfather had always insisted that "Charlotte's Web" was not a moral tale, so the poster struck me as particularly ominous. Had they turned it into a "Miracle on 34th St." or worse? I was tempted to quote the much-used family adage about my grandfather, who was well-known for turning down social occasions. "If White could have been there today, he wouldn't have been there," I might have said.

Instead, I guessed that he would have been gracious. The movies sell books, after all, and I've just spent two years getting the "Letters of E.B. White, Revised Edition" back on bookstore shelves.

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