beatrix potter biography

Beatrix Potter

(1866-1943)

Who Was Beatrix Potter?

Beatrix Potter spent a solitary childhood with long holidays in the country. She loved to sketch animals and later invented stories about them. In 1902, Potter published The Tale of Peter Rabbit , which launched her career as a children's author. More than 20 other books for young audiences soon followed. Potter's tales of Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Benjamin Bunny and others have become children's classics.

Early Years

Born Helen Beatrix Potter on July 28, 1866, in London, England, Potter is one of the most beloved children's authors of all time. She was the daughter of Rupert and Helen Potter, both of whom had artistic interests. Her father trained as a lawyer, but he never actually practiced. Instead, he devoted himself to photography and art. Her mother Helen was skilled at embroidery and watercolors. Potter got to know several influential artists and writers through her parents, including painter John Everett Millais.

Potter, along with her young brother Bertram, developed an interest in nature and animals at an early age. The pair often roamed the countryside during family vacations to Scotland and England's Lake District. Potter demonstrated a talent for sketching as a child with animals being one of her favorite subjects. In the late 1870s, she began studying at the National Art Training School.

Peter Rabbit and Other Tales

Potter first tasted success as an illustrator, selling some of her work to be used for greeting cards. One of her most famous works, The Tale of Peter Rabbit , started out as a story she wrote for the children of a former governess in a letter. Potter later transformed this letter into a book, which she published privately.

In 1902, Frederick Warne & Co. brought this delightful story to the public. Their new edition of The Tale Of Peter Rabbit quickly became a hit with young readers. More animal adventures soon followed with The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903) and The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904) among other stories. Norman Warne worked as her editor on many of these early titles.

Potter suffered a great personal loss in 1905 when Warne died. He passed away just weeks after he proposed to her. Her parents, however, had objected to the match. She bought Hill Top Farm in the Lake District that same year and there she wrote such books as The Tale of Tom Kitten (1907) and The Tale of Samuel Whiskers (1908).

Later Life and Death

In 1913, Potter married local lawyer William Heelis. She only produced a few more books after tying the knot. Potter published The Fairy Caravan in 1926, but only in the United States. She thought the book was too autobiographical to be released in England. The Tale of Little Pig Robinson (1930) proved to be her final children's book.

Instead of writing, Potter focused much of her attention on her farms and land preservation in the Lake District. She was a successful breeder of sheep and well regarded for her work to protect the beautiful countryside she adored.

Potter died on December 22, 1943, in Sawrey, England. In her will, she left much of her land holdings to the National Trust to protect it from development and to preserve it for future generations. Potter also left behind a mystery—she had written a journal in code. The code was finally cracked and the work published in 1966 as The Journal of Beatrix Potter . To this day, generation after generation are won over by her charming tales and illustrations.

In 2016, Beatrix Potter fans received welcome news. A previously unpublished story, The Tale of Kitty-in-Boots , would be making its way to bookstore shelves that fall. An unedited manuscript for the work had been discovered by children's book editor Jo Hanks. Potter had only done one illustration for the book so Quentin Blake created the images to accompany this tale.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Helen Beatrix Potter
• Birth Year: 1866
• Birth date: July 28, 1866
• Birth City: London
• Birth Country: England
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: British author Beatrix Potter wrote and illustrated more than 20 children's books starring Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle-Duck and Benjamin Bunny.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Leo
• Death Year: 1943
• Death date: December 22, 1943
• Death City: Sawrey
• Death Country: England

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Beatrix Potter Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/beatrix-potter
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: April 22, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014

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Biography Online

Beatrix Potter Biography

Beatrix Potter was a writer, illustrator and conservationist. She is best remembered for her best-selling children’s books, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit . Stories that combined her love for both animals and the English countryside. In her later life, she bought a substantial amount of land in the Lake District and on her death donated it to the National Trust, helping to preserve a significant part of the Lake District national park.

Short bio Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter (28 July 1866 – 22 December 1943)

She spent much of her early life in her own company; she rarely saw her brother Ewan, who was sent to boarding school. Having little social contact with children of her own age, Beatrix began to be drawn into her own world of creating her own stories, based on animals. Beatrix was a naturally gifted artist, and with some art lessons, she also learnt the technical side of drawing. She later wrote:

“Thank goodness I was never sent to school; it would have rubbed off some of the originality. ”

In her early 20s, Beatrix’s parents tried to arrange a suitable partner for Beatrix to marry. Many suitable suitors were found; however, for each prospective marriage partnership Beatrix turned them down. She was a fiercely independent woman, and she disliked the idea of being tied down to an uneventful domestic life of staying at home and bringing up children. Thus, unusually for the late Victorian time period, Beatrix remained single and stayed at home.

Publication of Peter Rabbit Books

In her 20s that she sought to try and get her children’s book and drawings published. Her initial attempts proved unsuccessful, but she persevered and eventually it was taken on by Frederick Warne & Company. The first book was published in 1902 when Beatrix was 36. The publishers did not have much hope it would sell many copies; they actually gave the project to their youngest brother, Norman, as a kind of test for his first project. However, Norman proved to be a good choice. He warmed to both the book and Beatrix. He was determined to make a success of the book and developed a good working relationship with Beatrix as they pored over the individual details of the book. It was Norman who insisted that each drawing of Peter Rabbit would be in colour. Beatrix insisted that the book remain small, so that it would be easy for children to hold. By the end of the year, 28,000 copies were in print.

Beatrix also had a good business sense. As early as 1903, she patented a Peter Rabbit doll. These spin-offs provided a good source of additional income, enabling her to become wealthy.

Relationship with Norman Warne

The relationship between Norman and Beatrix blossomed, and eventually, they became engaged in 1906. However, Beatrix’s parents disapproved. They felt it wrong for Beatrix to marry a tradesman. However, they eventually relented, but insisted Beatrix live apart for 6 months; giving her time to change her mind. Tragically, before the wedding could take place, Norman passed away, dying of pernicious anaemia. Beatrix was devastated, she wrote a letter to his sister, Millie, saying; “He did not live long, but he fulfilled a useful happy life. I must try to make a fresh beginning next year.”

After his death, Beatrix moved to the Lakeland. In 1905, she bought Hill Top Farm, in Sawrey, Cumbria. She lived here for the remainder of her life. Due to failing eyesight, Beatrix later stopped writing her children books; instead, she devoted her time to the breading of sheep and helping the conservation of Lakeland farms. She was particularly interested in the breeding and raising of local Herdwick sheep, and she became one of the major Herdwick sheep farmers of the area. She felt very much at home in the local agricultural shows:

I hate publicity, and I have contrived to survive to be an old woman without it, except in the homey atmosphere of Agricultural Shows. [1939 interview]

Beatrix Potter with William Heelis

She married William Heelis in 1913 when she was 47. The couple were childless, though Beatrix played an active role in William’s extended family, such as his many nieces of his brothers and sisters. In this later period, her writing tailed off. She only wrote and drew a small quantity, mostly for her own interest. Her life was taken up with farming, conservation, and looking after her family.

Beatrix Potter – Conservation in Lake District

Due to proceeds from her very successful books and later her inheritance, Beatrix was able to buy many working farms. On her death, she left over 4,000 acres to the National Trust. It is one of the biggest legacies’s ever made.

Potter wrote 23 books. Some of her best-known titles include:

The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902)

• The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903)
• The Tailor of Gloucester (1903)
• The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904)
• The Tale of Two Bad Mice (1904)
• The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (1905)
• The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan (1905)
• The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher (1906)
• The Story of A Fierce Bad Rabbit (1906)

In 2007 a film Miss Potter was released, starring Renée Zellweger. It focused mainly on the events surrounding her early publications, and romance with Norman Warne.

Citation:  Pettinger, Tejvan . “Beatrix Potter Biography”, Oxford, UK. www.biographyonline.net , published 29 May 2012, Last updated 22 September 2019.

The Story of Beatrix Potter

The Story of Beatrix Potter at Amazon

Quotes of Beatrix Potter

“Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.”

– Beatrix Potter

I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense…

Journal entry (1896-11-17), from the National Trust collection.

Once upon a time there were four little Rabbits, and their names were – Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter.

Don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: your father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit

“The place is changed now, and many familiar faces are gone, but the greatest change is myself. I was a child then, I had no idea what the world would be like. I wished to trust myself on the waters and the sea. Everything was romantic in my imagination. The woods were peopled by the mysterious good folk. The Lords and Ladies of the last century walked with me along the overgrown paths, and picked the old fashioned flowers among the box and rose hedges of the garden.”

— Beatrix Potter

“It sometimes happens that the town child is more alive to the fresh beauty of the country than a child who is country born. My brother and I were born in London…but our descent, our interest and our joy were in the north country’. Quoted in The Tale of Beatrix Potter a Biography by Margaret Lane, First Edition p 32-33” — Beatrix Potter

• Beatrix Potter Quotes

Introducing Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter remains one of the world's best-selling and best-loved children's authors. She wrote and illustrated 28 books, including her 23 Tales which have sold more than 250 million copies worldwide. In her later years, she became a farmer and sheep breeder and helped protect thousands of acres of land in the Lake District.

Helen Beatrix Potter was born on 28 July 1866 and lived for much of the first 47 years of her life at her family's home at 2 Bolton Gardens in Kensington, then a semi-rural part of London. The Potter family were well connected. Edmund, Beatrix's paternal grandfather, had become wealthy by establishing a successful mechanised calico printing works at Dinting Vale in Glossop, Derbyshire, and later became a Liberal MP for Carlisle, whilst Beatrix's maternal grandfather, John Leech, was a merchant who inherited a cotton mill at Stalybridge in Cheshire.

The Potter family had artistic leanings. Edmund was co-founder of the Manchester School of Design. Her grandmother, Jane Leech, and her mother, Helen, were both skilful embroiderers, and Helen also enjoyed painting in watercolours (Beatrix later inherited her grandmother's embroidery copy book and Helen's watercolour paintbox). Rupert, her father, kept a sketchbook in his youth which he filled with landscapes, nature studies, caricatures and copies of illustrations, mostly in pen and ink. He focused much of his time, however, on his passion for the new art form of photography and was elected to the Photographic Society of London in 1869 (now The Royal Photographic Society). Rupert was friendly with the artist Sir John Everett Millais, whose studio was close to the Potter's home, and helped him by providing photographs of his portrait sitters and landscape backgrounds as reference images.

Rupert Potter's favourite photographic subject, though, was Beatrix, who endured patiently the elaborate choreography and uncomfortably long exposure time. The photographic record of Beatrix's life captures her at home in London, on holiday in the countryside, formal amongst family, or relaxed among her pets. It was Beatrix's delight to accompany her father on photographic expeditions and she became an avid photographer herself, later inheriting one of her father's old cameras, which she described as "a most inconveniently heavy article…which has been breaking my back since I took to that profession".

Beatrix was educated at home by a governess and encouraged to draw from an early age, learning through practice, drawing from nature or copying illustrations. She kept sketchbooks from at least the age of eight. She would later say that she was grateful that her education was "neglected", as a more formal education "would have rubbed off some of the originality". Beatrix's love of nature and art was shared by her brother Bertram , who later became a professional landscape oil painter and etcher. The pair spent hours watching and studying the menagerie of pets in their schoolroom: frogs, a tortoise, salamanders, bats, mice and rabbits. They also had a cabinet in the corner of their room in which they kept a collection of insects, shells, birds' eggs, rocks and fossils.

As a young girl, Beatrix's horizons were limited to the areas closest to home. She went swimming, and visited the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens or the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park – her paternal grandparents owned a house near Hyde Park. On holiday she had more freedom. Visits to relatives and annual holidays in Perthshire in Scotland and, later, the Lake District, gave her the chance to roam freely in the countryside, on foot or driving a pony-and-trap. At 18, while staying at Bush Hall in Hertfordshire, she took her first driving lesson in a little horse-drawn carriage, which she liked "very much, had no misfortune yet".

Once Bertram went to boarding school, Beatrix was left to continue her education at home on her own. She studied geometry, geography, French and German, and Latin poetry. By June 1883, at the age of 16, she "thought to [be] cutting off more and more time for painting" and between November 1878 and May 1883 her parents arranged for her to have drawing lessons. She also took examinations at the National Art Training School attached to the South Kensington Museum (later renamed the V&A). Beatrix's student pieces from this period included still life studies and exercises in design and perspective, in typically formal style. She was sceptical about formal art training, writing on 28 May 1883: "Painting is an awkward thing to teach except the details of the medium. If you and your master are determined to look at nature and art in two different directions you are sure to stick". Twelve lessons in oil painting from an artist known only as 'Mrs A' made her ambivalent about the teaching method. She wrote in her Journal on 29 November 1883: "Do not like my drawing lessons. She speaks of nothing but smoothness, softness, breaking the colours, and the lightness of the shadows, till there is nothing left".

Copying work by other artists, however, was to remain part of her informal art education. She regularly visited the South Kensington Museum close to her home and made copies of paintings by Constable and prints she saw in the Library. She was awestruck when she first had the opportunity to go to art exhibitions in central London. She first visited the Royal Academy Winter exhibition in 1883 and, despite having relatives with good art collections, she exclaimed (13 January): "I never thought there could be such pictures. It is almost too much to see them all at once – just fancy seeing five magnificent Van Dyck's [sic] side by side, before me who never thought to see one". She continued to visit galleries regularly through the years and wrote critical observations of them in her journal.

Through her 20s, Beatrix began making studies of plants and animals at the Natural History Museum and learned how to draw what she saw under a microscope. She also developed an interest in archaeology and fossils, but her major passion from the mid-1880s was mycology – the study of fungi. After a decade of collecting and drawing mushrooms she began to speculate about their methods of reproduction and experimented in spore germination, preparing drawings of her observations through a microscope and a paper (now lost) entitled: On the Germination of the Spores of the Agaricineae [gilled fungi]. With the help of her uncle, the chemist Sir Henry Roscoe, she managed to have the essay presented on her behalf at a meeting of The Linnean Society (since as a woman she could not attend herself) in 1897.

In 1890, Potter was to receive her first illustration commission from a greetings card company, Hildesheimer and Faulkner. Her children's books evolved more unexpectedly, from illustrated letters she wrote to the children of her former governess, Annie Moore. The first, to Noel in September 1893, featured a rabbit named Peter. The next day she wrote one to Noel's brother Eric about a frog and later wrote one about a squirrel to their sister Norah. In about 1900, Beatrix copied her letter to Noel to make a rough version of The Tale of Peter Rabbit and set about printing her own edition. In 1902, the publisher Frederick Warne agreed to publish a version with colour images. This was an immediate success and marked the start of a long and successful relationship in which they released two storybooks a year.

Her work with Frederick Warne led Beatrix to a close friendship with her editor Norman Warne, who proposed to her in July 1905. Tragically, Norman unexpectedly died of pernicious anaemia less than a month later and a devastated Beatrix threw herself into renovating a new property, Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey, near Esthwaite Water in the Lake District. She continued to write one or two new books a year for Warne for the next eight years but her focus began to move towards a new life in the Lake District.

In 1909, through purchasing another Cumbrian property, Castle Farm (near to Hill Top), Potter met and then befriended a local solicitor, William Heelis. After a period of battling her parents' objections to her relationship with a country solicitor, Beatrix married William in 1913 and settled permanently in the Lake District at Castle Cottage. At last, she was able to throw herself more fully into farming. Ten years later she bought a substantial sheep farm, Troutbeck Park, in 1923. Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley (1851 – 1920) introduced Beatrix to the endangered Herdwick sheep breed that had helped to shape the fells through grazing for thousands of years. These hardy sheep could withstand the harsh winter conditions and were taught over generations to remain within their particular part of the unfenced fell. She employed the shepherd Tom Storey, and soon the flocks across the farms she managed were thriving. She did not immediately give up her book work, but the demands of farming on her time and her failing eyesight meant that new works tended to be pieced together from drawings made many years earlier. Her last storybook was The Tale of Little Pig Robinson , published in 1930.

Apart from farming, Beatrix's other major passion towards the end of her life was land conservation, an interest that was also inspired by her friendship with Rawnsley, one of the founders of the National Trust. Beatrix's expanding estate, funded by revenue from her book sales, allowed her to fulfil an ambition to preserve the Lake District's unique landscape and its traditional farming methods. When Beatrix died aged 77 on 22 December 1943 she left 14 farms and more than 4,000 acres to the National Trust.

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Beatrix Potter with a border terrier at Lingholm, Keswick, by Rupert Potter, 3 October 1897, albumen photograph, given by Joan Duke. Museum no. E.765-2005. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Leap Into the Surprising, Art-Filled Life of Beatrix Potter in a New Exhibition

The beloved author of “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” also wrote diaries in code, sketched fungi and raised prize-winning sheep

Nora McGreevy

Correspondent

Early on in her career, beloved children’s author Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) paid several visits to the local museum in her native South Kensington, London.

She went to make sketches of a silk 18th-century man’s waistcoat that had been expertly embroidered with neat pink, blue and green flowers. To Potter’s eye, the jacket’s button-hole stitches were “so small— so  small—they looked as if they had been made by little mice!” Drawing from local legend about a miraculously appeared waistcoat, Potter wrote and illustrated her own version of events, where a poor tailor’s business is saved from ruin by a crew of singing, sewing mice.

That story became The Tailor of Gloucester (1902), one of Potter’s dozens of books that have collectively sold more than 250 million copies to date. And the museum where Potter sketched is now the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), which recently opened a new exhibition dedicated to the unconventional, art- and animal-filled life of Potter herself.

Titled “ Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature ,” the show explores the art and stories behind Potter’s world-famous creations, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit , as well as her lesser-known achievements as a sheep breeder and a scientific illustrator of fungi and beetles. Museumgoers can visit in-person through January 2023, while viewers can also watch videos , read biographical essays and explore close-up reproductions of Potter’s finely detailed drawings online.

Some sketches on display date to when Potter was just 8 or 9 years old, as Sarah Cascone reports for Artnet News . Highlights of the more than 200 objects on view include rarely seen Potter family photographs; the author’s muddy clogs, used for outdoor traipsing and farming; and her walking stick, complete with an inset magnifying glass that allowed her to better study the natural world, according to a V&A statement .

Potter’s passion for nature takes center stage in this exhibition, as co-curator Annemarie Bilclough tells Artnet News. “[T]he theme of nature underpins everything she did,” the curator says.

Potter grew up a sheltered, creative child in Victorian-era London. Their controlling parents kept Potter and her brother, Bertram, isolated from other children for fear that they might “catch germs,” according to the National Trust .

As Bilclough notes in the V&A statement, “Potter was a ‘town mouse’ longing to be a country mouse.” She longed to be in nature but lived in London for the first 47 years of her life, so she often had to settle for museums, libraries and gardens. She and her brother kept dozens of beloved pets—more than 90 throughout Potter’s life—and collected insects, hedgehogs, snakes, and owls in their family home.

Potter’s first career ambition was to become a mycologist. She worked for a time at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, where she channeled her lifelong passion for art into meticulously detailed renderings of various fungi. Potter even once attempted to submit a scientific paper on spore germination to the Linnean Society—but eventually withdrew , per a V&A biography .

As a teenager and well into adulthood, Potter wrote all her diaries in a cryptic secret code. Subsequent researchers only managed to crack it in the 1960s, reports Anna Russell for the New Yorker .

Several of these rarely seen drawings of mushrooms are on view at the V&A. “Many will be familiar with the extraordinary legacy of Potter’s storybooks, but in this exhibition they will discover how her talent at making her characters real emerged from a long-standing curiosity for the small details of nature, which could have led her down a different career path,” adds Bilclough in the statement.

Her parents hoped to groom their daughter to become a live-in housekeeper and caretaker, per the New Yorker . But it was Potter’s knack for telling stories that eventually won her financial and personal independence. In letters to the children of her former governess, Potter would write down stories about her pet rabbits, Peter Piper and Benjamin Bouncer, and illustrated them with lively sketches. (These rabbits would inspire two of Potter’s most famous characters, the mischievous Peter Rabbit and his cousin Benjamin Bunny.)

When the children’s mother suggested that Potter turn these stories into a published book, Potter created the manuscript for Peter Rabbit  and began pitching her creation to publishing houses. No editors bit until Norman Warne, of Frederick Warne & Co., agreed to publish the first edition of Peter Rabbit in 1902.

The book was an immediate and enduring best-seller: In the 120 years since its publication, Peter Rabbit has never gone out of print, per the museum statement. Buoyed by her success, Potter set to work creating more indelible tales such as The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and the Tailor of Gloucester , per the New Yorker .

Potter became briefly engaged to Norman Warne, her editor, but he died suddenly and tragically before they could marry. In her grief and with newfound financial freedom, Potter moved to the Lakes District in the northern English countryside, buying a farmhouse and estate known as Hill Top .

At Hill Top, Potter finally realized a lifelong dream of living in close contact with nature. She became a farmer, raised prize-winning sheep for competitions and used proceeds from her books to buy the surrounding landscape and protect it from developers. She married a local lawyer, William Heelis, despite her parent’s objections. And when she died at age 77, she left more than 4,000 acres in her Hill Top estate to the National Trust, reports Artnet News .

Bilclough tells Artnet News that she hopes audiences will leave the exhibition with a deeper understanding of Potter’s determined, multifaceted personality.

“Her legacy can be seen in more than one way,” the curator adds. “We wanted take a broad view of her achievements beyond her storybooks, because there was such a wide range.”

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Nora McGreevy is a former daily correspondent for Smithsonian . She is also a freelance journalist based in Chicago whose work has appeared in Wired , Washingtonian , the Boston Globe , South Bend Tribune , the New York Times and more.

Beatrix Potter

Peter Rabbit's Creator

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Beatrix Potter Facts

Known for: writing and illustrating classic children's stories, featuring anthropomorphic country animals, often-sophisticated vocabulary, unsentimental themes often dealing with danger. Less well-known: her natural history illustrations, scientific discovery and conservation efforts. Occupation: writer, illustrator, artist, naturalist, mycologist, conservationist. Dates: July 28, 1866 - December 22, 1943 Also known as: Helen Potter, Helen Beatrix Potter, Mrs. Heelis

Background, Family:

• Mother: Helen Leech
• Father: Rupert Potter
• Siblings: Bertram
• Birthplace: Bolton Gardens, South Kensington, London, England
• Religion: Unitarian
• privately educated

Marriage, Children:

• husband: William Heelis (married 1913; solicitor)
• children: none

Beatrix Potter Biography:

After an isolated childhood, and for much of her life controlled by her parents, Beatrix Potter explored scientific illustration and investigation before giving up in the face of exclusion from scientific circles. She wrote her famous children's books, then married and turned to sheep herding and conservation.

Beatrix Potter was born the first child of wealthy parents, both heirs to cotton fortunes. Her father, a non-practicing barrister, enjoyed painting and photography.

Beatrix Potter was raised mainly by governesses and servants. She lived a quite isolated childhood until the birth of her brother Bertram 5-6 years after her own. Eventually he was sent to boarding school and she was back to isolation other than during summers.

Most of Beatrix Potter's education was from tutors at home. She became very interested in nature on summer trips for three months to Scotland during her earlier years and, starting in her teen years, to England's Lake District. During these summer trips, Beatrix and her brother Bertram explored the outdoors.

She became interested in natural history, including plants, birds, animals, fossils and astronomy. She kept many pets as a child, a habit she continued later in life. These pets, often adopted during summer trips and sometimes taken back to the London house, included mice, rabbits, frogs, a tortoise, lizards, bats, a snake and a hedgehog named "Miss Tiggy." A rabbit was named Peter and another Benjamin.

The two siblings collected animal and plant specimens. With Bertram, Beatrix studied animal skeletons. Fungus-hunting and collecting samples was another summer pastime.

Beatrix was encouraged in her developing interest in art by her governesses and her parents. She began with flower sketches. In her teens, she painted accurate images of what she saw with a microscope. Her parents arranged for private instruction in drawing when she was aged 12 to 17. This work led to a certificate as an art student from the Science and Art Department of the Committee of Council on Education, the only educational certification she ever achieved.

Beatrix Potter also read widely. Among her reading were Maria Edgeworth stories, Sir Walter Scott Waverley novels and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland . Beatrix Potter wrote a diary in code from ages 14 to 31, which was deciphered and published in 1966.

Her drawing and nature interests led Beatrix Potter to spend time at the British Museum of Natural History near her London home. She drew fossils and embroidery, and began also studying fungi there. She connected with a Scottish fungi expert, Charles McIntosh, who encouraged her interest.

Using a microscope to observe fungi, and getting them to reproduce at home from spores, Beatrix Potter worked on a book of drawings of fungi. Her uncle, Sir Henry Roscoe, brought the drawings to the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, but he showed no interest in the work. George Massee, the assistant director at the Botanical Gardens, did take interest in what she was doing.

When she produced a paper documenting her work with fungi, "The Germination of the Spores of Agaricinaea , George Massee presented the paper at the Linnaean Society of London. Potter could not present it there herself, because women were not permitted to enter the Society. But the all-male Society showed no further interest in her work, and Potter turned to other paths.

Illustrator

In 1890, Potter offered some illustrations of fanciful animals to a London card publisher, thinking they could be used on Christmas cards. This led to an offer: to illustrate a book of poems by Frederick Weatherley (who may have been a friend of her father). The book, which Potter illustrated with pictures of well-dressed rabbits, was titled A Happy Pair.

While Beatrix Potter continued to live at home, under fairly tight control of her parents, her brother Bertram managed to move out to Roxburghshire, where he took up farming.

Peter Rabbit

Beatrix Potter continued drawing, including drawings of animals included in letters to children of her acquaintance. One such correspondent was her former governess, Mrs. Annie Carter Moore. Hearing that Moore's 5-year-old son Noel was ill with scarlet fever, on September 4, 1893, Beatrix Potter sent him a letter to cheer him up, including a little story about Peter Rabbit, complete with sketches illustrating the story.

Beatrix became involved in work with the National Trust, to preserve open land for future generations. She worked with Canon H. D. Rawnsly, who convinced her to create a picture book of her Peter Rabbit story. Potter then sent to book to six different publishers, but found no one willing to take her work. So she published the book privately, with her drawing and story, with about 250 copies, in December 1901. The next year one of the publishers she'd contacted, Frederick Warne & Co., took up the story, and published it, substituting water color illustrations for the earlier drawings. She also published The Tailor of Gloucester privately that year, and later Warne reprinted it. She insisted that it be published as a small book, small enough for a child to easily hold it.

Independence

Her royalties began to give her some financial independence from her parents. Working with the youngest son of the publisher, Norman Warne, she became closer to him, and over her parents' objections (because he was a tradesman), they became engaged. They announced their engagement in July, 1905, and four weeks later, in August, he died of leukemia. She wore her engagement ring from Warne on her right hand, for the rest of her life.

Success as Author/Illustrator

The period from 1906 to 1913 was her most productive as an author/illustrator. She continued writing and illustrating books. She used her royalties to buy a farm in the Lake District, near the town of Sawrey. She named it "Hill Top." She rented it to the existing tenants, and visited often, though she continued to live with her parents.

She not only published books with her stories, she oversaw their design and production. She also insisted on copyrighting the characters, and she helped promote products based on the characters. She herself oversaw production of the first Peter Rabbit doll, insisting it be made in Britain. She supervised other products to the end of her life, including bibs and blankets, dishes and board games.

In 1909, Beatrix Potter bought another Sawrey property, Castle Farm. A local solicitors' firm managed the property, she she planned improvements with the help of a young partner at the firm, William Heelis. Eventually, they became engaged. Potter's parents disapproved of this relationship, too, but her brother Bertram supported her engagement -- and revealed his own secret marriage to a woman their parents also considered below their station.

Marriage and Life as a Farmer

In October 1913, Beatrix Potter married William Heelis in a Kensington church, and they moved to Hill Top. Although both were notably shy, from most accounts she dominated the relationship, and also enjoyed her new role as a wife. She published only a few more books. By 1918, her eyesight was failing.

Her father and brother both died soon after her marriage, and with her inheritance, she was able to buy a large sheep farm outside Sawrey, and the couple moved there in 1923. Beatrix Potter (now preferring to be known as Mrs. Heelis) focused on farming and land conservation. In 1930 she became the first woman elected as president of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association. She continued to work with the National Trust to preserve open lands for posterity.

By that time, she was no longer writing. In 1936, she turned down an offer by Walt Disney to turn Peter Rabbit into a film. She was approached by a writer, Margaret Lane, who proposed writing a biography; Potter rudely discouraged Lane.

Death and Legacy

Beatrix Potter died in 1943 of uterine cancer. Two more of her stories were published posthumously. She left Hill Top and her other land to the National Trust. Her home, in the Lake District, became a museum. Margaret Lane was able to pressure Heelis, Potter's widow, into cooperating on the biography, which was published in 1946. That same year, Beatrix Potter's home was opened to the public.

In 1967, her fungi paintings -- initially rejected by the London Botanical Gardens -- were used in a guide to English fungi. And in 1997, the Linnaean Society of London, which had refused her admittance to read her own research paper, hnorored her with an apology for her exclusion.

Beatrix Potter's Illustrated Children's Books

• The Tale of Peter Rabbit . 1901, 1902.
• The Tailor of Gloucester . 1902, 1903.
• The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin . 1903.
• The Tale of Benjamin Bunny . 1904.
• The Tale of Two Bad Mice . 1904.
• The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle . 1905.
• The Pie and the Patty-Pan . 1905. As  The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan . 1930.
• The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher . 1906.
• The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit . 1906.
• The Story of Miss Moppet . 1906.
• The Tale of Tom Kitten . 1907.
• The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck . 1908.
• The Roly-Poly Pudding . 1908. As  The Tale of Samuel Whiskers; or, The Roly-Poly Pudding . 1926.
• The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies . 1909.
• Ginger and Pickles . 1909.
• The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse . 1910.
• Peter Rabbit's Painting Book . 1911.
• The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes . 1911.
• The Tale of Mr. Tod . 1912.
• The Tale of Pigling Bland . 1913.
• Tom Kitten's Painting Book . 1917.
• The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse . 1918.
• Jemima Puddle-Duck's Painting Book . 1925.
• Peter Rabbit's Almanac for 1929 . 1928.
• The Fairy Caravan . 1929.
• The Tale of Little Pig Robinson . 1930.
• Wag-by-Wall, Horn Book . 1944.
• Yours Affectionately, Peter Rabbit: Miniature Letters by Beatrix Potter , edited by Anne Emerson. 1983.
• The Complete Tales of Peter Rabbit: And Other Favorite Stories . 2001.

Rhymes / Verse

• Appley Dapply's Nursery Rhymes . 1917.
• Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes . 1922.
• Beatrix Potter's Nursery Rhyme Book . 1984.
• F. E. Weatherley.  A Happy Pair . 1893.
• Comical Customers . 1894.
• W. P. K. Findlay.  Wayside and Woodland Fungi . 1967.
• Joel Chandler Harris.  Tales of Uncle Remus .
• Lewis Carroll.  Alice in Wonderland .

Written by Beatrix Potter, Illustrated by Others

• Sister Anne . Illustrated by Katharine Sturges. 1932.
• The Tale of the Faithful Dove . Illustrated by Marie Angel. 1955, 1956.
• The Tale of Tuppenny . Illustrated by Marie Angel. 1973.

More by Beatrix Potter

• The Art of Beatrix Potter: Direct Reproductions of Beatrix Potter's Preliminary Studies and Finished Drawings, Also Examples of Her Original Manuscript . Leslie Linder and W. A. Herring, editors. 1955. Revised edition, 1972.
• The Journal of Beatrix Potter from 1881 to 1897, transcribed from her code writing by Leslie Linder . 1966.
• Letters to Children, Harvard College Library Department of Printing and Graphic Arts . 1967.
• Beatrix Potter's Birthday Book . Enid Linder, editor. 1974.
• Dear Ivy, Dear June: Letters from Beatrix Potter . Margaret Crawford Maloney, editor. 1977.
• Beatrix Potter's Americans: Selected Letters . Jane Crowell Morse, editor. 1981.
• Beatrix Potter's Letters.  Judy Taylor, introduction and selection of letters. 1989.

Books About Beatrix Potter

• Margaret Lane.  The Tale of Beatrix Potter . 1946. Revised edition, 1968.
• Marcus Crouch.  Beatrix Potter . 1960, 1961.
• Dorothy Aldis.  Nothing Is Impossible: The Story of Beatrix Potter . 1969.
• Leslie Linder.  A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter including Unpublished Work . 1971.
• Leslie Linder.  The History of "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" . 1976.
• Margaret Lane.  The Magic Years of Beatrix Potter . 1978.
• Ulla Hyde Parker.  Cousin Beatie: A Memory of Beatrix Potter.  1981.
• Deborah Rolland.  Beatrix Potter in Scotland . 1981.
• Elizabeth M. Buttrick.  The Real World of Beatrix Potter . 1986.
• Ruth MacDonald.  Beatrix Potter . 1986.
• Judy Taylor.  Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller and Countrywoman . 1986.
• Elizabeth Buchan.  Beatrix Potter . 1987.
• Judy Taylor.  That Naughty Rabbit: Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit . 1987.
• Judy Taylor, Joyce Irene Whalley, Anne Hobbs and Elizabeth M. Buttrick.  Beatrice Potter 1866 - 1943: The Artist and Her World . 1987, 1988.
• Wynne Bartlett and Joyce Irene Whalley.  Beatrix Potter's Derventwater . 1988.
• Alexander Grinstein.  The Remarkable Beatrix Potter . 1995.
• Elizabeth Buchan, Beatrix Potter and Mike Dodd.  Beatrix Potter: The Story of the Creator of Peter Rabbit (World of Beatrix Potter) . 1998.
• John Heelis.  Tale of Mrs. William Heelis - Beatrix Potter . 1999.
• Nicole Savy and Diana Syrat.  Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit . 2002.
• Hazel Gatford.  Beatrix Potter: Her Art and Inspiration  (National Trust Guidebooks). 2006.
• Linda Lear.  Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature . 2008.
• Annie Bullen.  Beatrix Potter . 2009.
• Susan Denyer.  At Home with Beatrix Potter: The Creator of Peter Rabbit . 2009.
• W.R. Mitchell.  Beatrix Potter: Her Lakeland Years . 2010.

Exhibitions of Beatrix Potter Drawings

Some of the exhibitions of the drawings of Beatrix Potter:

• 1972: Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• 1976: National Book League, London.
• 1983: Abbott Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria.
• 1987: Tate Gallery, London.
• 1988: Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
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The Secret Life of Beatrix Potter

By Anna Russell

Many teen-agers will go to great lengths to keep their diaries private—I kept a little key for mine in a wooden jewelry box, which I guarded jealously—but the children’s book author Beatrix Potter took it to an extreme. Between the ages of fourteen and thirty, she fastidiously recorded observations about her stiff Victorian world in several journals. Her parents, descendants of wealthy cotton merchants in the North of England, were rich and exceedingly proper. Perhaps to protect her work, Potter wrote in a minuscule handwriting using a code that only she could understand. Her journals remained a mystery until 1958, when a collector, searching through them, identified a passing reference to Louis XVI, and then painstakingly decoded years’ worth of Potter’s innermost thoughts. (Fans are nosy, too).

In public, Potter, the author of “ The Tale of Peter Rabbit ” and “ The Tale of Benjamin Bunny ,” whose books have now sold more than two hundred and fifty million copies, was demure and perfectly respectable. In private, the journals suggest, she was forthright and opinionated, a budding artist, who delighted in the detail and humor of everyday life. “She was quite a strong and determined personality,” Annemarie Bilclough, who co-curated an exhibition on her life at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, told me. Born in 1866, Potter lived with her parents in a grand house in South Kensington, a rapidly growing community, until she was forty-seven years old. She felt like an outsider much of the time. She hated the noise and grime of the city—“Why do people live in London so much?” she wondered—and longed to be in nature. She called her birthplace “unloved.” “My brother and I were born in London because my father was a lawyer there,” she wrote. “But our descent—our interests and our joy was in the north country.”

What was Potter doing all that time she lived at home with her parents? In childhood, she rarely ventured into the rest of London, and she had few friends besides her younger brother, Bertram. Mostly, it seems, she spent her days drawing. She drew compulsively, rapturously, from a young age, in a sketchbook that she made from drawer-lining paper and stationery. “It is all the same, drawing, painting, modelling, the irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye,” she wrote. She drew when she was unsettled, regardless of the subject. “I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result, and when I have a bad time come over me it is a stronger desire than ever, and settles on the queerest things,” she wrote in her journal. “Last time, in the middle of September, I caught myself in the back yard making a careful and admiring copy of the swill bucket, and the laugh it gave me brought me round.”

Potter’s sketchbook and coded journal, and many of her other belongings, are on display at the V. & A. through early next year, in an exhibition titled “Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature.” (Rizzoli has recently published an accompanying book by the same name.) Some two hundred and forty eclectic objects, including manuscripts, sketches, tchotchkes and collectibles—even the alleged pelt of Benjamin Bunny–—tell the story of a remarkable transformation. Having lived the first two-thirds of her life in near-total acquiescence to her family’s wishes, she made a sudden turn in her third act. “A town mouse longing to be a country mouse,” as Bilclough put it, Potter gave up the trappings of her privileged life in London and bought a cottage in a remote part of the English countryside. She became a farmer and conservationist, with muddy shoes and prize-winning sheep. She walked the fells and lakeside paths around her new home, sketching them, and ultimately saving them from destruction.

Potter may not have had many friends as a child, but she had lots of animals. She and Bertram sneaked a rotating cast of pets into their nursery, including snakes, salamanders, lizards, rabbits, frogs, and a fat hedgehog. The V. & A. exhibition, which includes a series of dark rooms that evoke the cloistered atmosphere of Potter’s childhood, showcases her early drawings of the natural world as she would have known it then: a mouse, a caterpillar, a beady lizard. The siblings loved animals, but they were “unsentimental about the realities of life and death,” as the show puts it. When their pets died, they would stuff them, or boil their skeletons for further study. There’s a drawing by Bertram of a pickled fish next to a human skull, and a note from him about his pet bat: “If he cannot be kept alive . . . you had better kill him, + stuff him as well as you can,” he wrote to Potter from boarding school. Nearby, stretched out in a display case, is a flattened rabbit hide and the disturbing sign, “Rabbit pelt, thought to be that of Benjamin Bouncer.” Benjamin Bouncer was one of a series of rabbits that Potter owned, and a favorite muse. She brought him home in a paper bag when she was in her teens. Later, she brought home the rabbit Peter Piper, who learned how to jump through hoops but “flatly refused to perform” in company.

In early adulthood, Potter observed her pets closely, inventing narratives about them, and filling her letters to the children of friends with their adventures. Her dispatches are playful and alive, illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings of rabbits. In 1892, she wrote a letter to Noel Moore, the son of her former governess, about an encounter that Benjamin Bunny had with a wild rabbit in the garden. (Benjamin hardly noticed; he was eating so much.) After Benjamin died (“through persistent devotion to peppermints”), Peter Piper became Potter’s leading man. In 1893, she wrote to Noel again: “My dear Noel, I don’t know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter.” A drawing of a whiskered Peter on his hind legs, ears perked, immediately suggests mischief.

Potter sent the Moore children story after story in illustrated letters, until Noel’s mother suggested that she try to turn them into books. (The children had saved their copies.) In 1901, Potter self-published the first edition of “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” which appeared almost exactly as she had written it to Noel, down to Peter’s “blue jacket with brass buttons, quite new.” A series of established publishers had turned her down, partly because of her insistence on keeping the book’s price low. “Little rabbits cannot afford to spend 6 shillings on one book, and would never buy it,” she wrote to a friend. She was also particular about the size of the book; it had to be small, for small hands. The following year, Frederick Warne & Co. agreed to put out an abridged version. Potter compromised on the cover image, which she called the “idiotic prancing rabbit.”

“Peter Rabbit” was an instant hit, selling out multiple editions. (“The public must be fond of rabbits! what an appalling quantity of Peter,” Potter wrote.) Her publisher asked for more books, and she began pumping them out one after another, beginning with “ The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin ” and “ The Tailor of Gloucester .” She also patented her characters. In the exhibition, there’s a fraying Jemima Puddle-Duck doll, with a fabric bonnet and shawl, and a Peter Rabbit teapot, as well as a complicated-looking board game. “She was very savvy in what was created, and what was made,” Helen Antrobus, who co-curated the show, told me. Potter believed that her first books found an audience because they were written for real children. “It is much more satisfactory to address a real live child,” she wrote. “I often think that that was the secret of the success of Peter Rabbit, it was written to a child—not made to order.”

She also had a knack for making the familiar strange. Her attention to the practicalities of being an animal, even a very civilized one, produced beguiling images. If a hedgehog wears a bonnet, as one does in “ The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle ,” her quills will certainly poke through. If a tortoise is invited to a dinner party, as happens in “ The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher ,” he’ll probably bring a salad in a string bag. She took silliness seriously. At the V. & A., one display case holds tiny folded letters that Potter wrote as if they were sent from one character to another: “Letters between Squirrel Nutkin, Twinkleberry Squirrel and Rt Hon. O. Brown, Esq. MP.”

Potter’s funniest tales are understated, and occasionally gruesome. Peter Rabbit’s father had an “accident” in Mr. McGregor’s garden, and Mrs. McGregor put him into a pie. The disrespectful Squirrel Nutkin, who loses his tail to an owl, is drawn in the owl’s talons with the caption, “This looks like the end of the story; but it isn’t.” In “ The Tale of Ginger and Pickles, ” a cat and a dog running a shop that caters to rabbits and mice struggle to rein in their appetites. “It would never do to eat our customers,” Pickles says. “They would leave us and go to Tabitha Twitchit’s.”

As Potter’s career was taking off, something else was happening, too: she was falling in love with her editor, Norman Warne. It wasn’t exactly a whirlwind romance—they saw each other with chaperons—though it must have felt that way to Potter. At thirty-nine, she was still living with her parents, who disapproved of Warne’s background in “trade.” (Gasp!) They wanted her to stay at home and continue running their affairs. Still, when he proposed, Potter accepted without hesitation. A month after the engagement, while Potter was vacationing in Wales, Warne died suddenly of lymphatic leukemia. She didn’t make it back in time to say goodbye.

Potter had long dreamed of owning a farm. A few months after Warne’s death, she completed the purchase of the thirty-four-acre Hill Top Farm, in England’s Lake District, in the far north of the country, an area that her family had visited for years. She bought it with money that she’d made from her books. The act was a “turning point,” Linda Lear wrote in the biography “ Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature ,” “a courageous assertion of personal freedom and emotional independence.” In Potter’s grief, she set about planting a garden. Years later, she wrote of the house, “It is in here I go to be quiet and still with myself. This is me, the deepest me, the part one has to be alone with.”

When I visited Hill Top recently, in the tiny village of Near Sawrey, the area looked to me like a storybook drawing of the English countryside: whitewashed houses, stone walls, and rolling, green hills. Lots of sheep and lots of rain. Near Sawrey contains just a handful of streets, a few dozen cottages, and a pub called the Tower Bank Arms. (There’s also a Far Sawrey, down the road, but no Sawrey.) Today, Hill Top is maintained as a house museum—a kind of Beatrix Potter shrine—by the National Trust, a conservation charity. The area is popular with hikers and families visiting nearby Windermere, and has become a place of pilgrimage for fans.

Hill Top itself is a two-story farmhouse originally from the seventeenth century, with a pitched roof and vines that creep up the outside. In the summer, the garden is full of roses, hollyhocks and saxifrage, but in late winter it is in hibernation, with just a few shoots poking through the hard ground. The site is still a working farm, and I could smell the animals; dogs were barking nearby. John Moffat, who manages National Trust properties in the area, showed me around. “It’s all still very much as it would have been when Beatrix was here,” he said.

Some people shut down after tragedy; others become extraordinarily productive. The eight years after Warne’s death were Potter’s most prolific in terms of literary output. She wrote more than a dozen books, including “ The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck ,” “The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher,” “ The Tale of Tom Kitten ” and “ The Tale of Samuel Whiskers .” She also threw herself into the renovation of Hill Top. Her letters during this time were full of practical problems—the house had rats and a bad roof—as she tried to find her feet among the locals. “I had rather a row with the plumber—or perhaps I ought to say I lost my temper!” she wrote in one. “If he won’t take orders from a lady I may pack him off & get one from Kendal.” She also bought up additional land to conserve it. She married a local lawyer named William Heelis, and moved into a cottage with him, but she kept Hill Top to herself, as a place to write, garden, and be alone.

Many of the stories that Potter wrote while living in Near Sawrey take an interest in country life. For “The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck,” about a fussy duck determined to find a place to hatch her eggs, Potter drew the Tower Bank Arms, as well as the gate to her garden. Her characters are genial country folk who retain their essential animal natures. (The sly fox whom Jemima speaks to reads a newspaper and sits on his tail to keep dry, but is also quite interested in her eggs.) In “The Tale of Samuel Whiskers,” Samuel Whiskers and his wife Anna Maria, both rats, are drawn running around Hill Top, gathering ingredients to bake Tom Kitten into a pie. (“ ‘No,’ said Samuel Whiskers, ‘make it properly, Anna Maria, with breadcrumbs.’ ”) Upstairs at Hill Top, there’s an intricate doll house with a miniature ham that Potter drew in “ The Tale of Two Bad Mice .”

Looking over her things, I was struck by the house’s modest proportions. (By the end of her life, Potter was the equivalent of a multimillionaire.) She could have remained in London, patiently keeping house for her parents, but instead she chose this life. The rooms felt cozy and curated, filled with knickknacks collected over the years, like a magpie’s nest. Her joy in having a space of her own is obvious. She was a late bloomer, but she grew decisively into herself.

As Potter aged, her writing slowed. The real animals around her—on her farms, and the hardy Herdwick sheep up in the hills—took precedence. Around Near Sawrey, she wore wool skirts and clogs, and went by the name of Mrs. Heelis. Her sheep won competitions. Beatrix Potter belonged to another life. When she died, in 1943, she left more than four thousand acres, and many working farms, to the National Trust, which now owns more than twenty per cent of the Lake District. Her bequest remains the Trust’s largest acquisition in the area. Potter’s shepherd, Tom Storey, scattered her ashes above Hill Top. “It was not only the landscape—it was the life, and the traditions, that she wanted to preserve,” Antrobus told me.

Around the corner from Hill Top, the Tower Bank Arms was filling up. There was a fire going, and a box of crocheted rabbits, which the Ladies of the Village were selling for charity, sat on the bar. From the pub, I walked through town up toward Moss Eccles Tarn, a small lake where Potter liked to paint while Heelis fished. In the rain, the landscape was foreboding, and a little wild. Several trees had fallen over. At the top of a hill, I watched as a flock of sheep grazed in the storm. They looked up curiously, and then went about their business.

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Beatrix Potter

A Legacy of Nature, Literature, and Art.

Contribution to British Heritage

Success and literary contributions, preservation of the lake district landscape, scientific and artistic contributions, legacy and impact.

• Beatrix Potter en.wikipedia.org

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The Beatrix Potter Society

Discover the extraordinary life & beautiful works of Beatrix Potter.

To celebrate the life of Beatrix Potter

The Beatrix Potter Society has been registered as a charity in the UK since 1980. We exist to promote the study and appreciation of the life and works of Beatrix Potter (1866 – 1943). She was not only the author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit and other classics of children’s literature but also a landscape and natural history artist, diarist, farmer and preservationist. Beatrix Potter was responsible for preserving large areas of the Lake District through her gifts to the National Trust.

The Beatrix Potter Society upholds and protects the integrity of the inimitable and unique work of Beatrix Potter, her aims and bequests and brings together those who share these interests worldwide.

Beatrix Potter was a talented watercolourist, particularly of the natural world, from an early age and her paintings and drawings are now in collections, both private and public, all over the world.

The Literature

Beatrix Potter is renowned for writing one of the most beloved children’s books of all time, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. She went on to write and illustrate many more books in her lifetime, many of which are still sold worldwide in many languages.

The Scientist

Although Beatrix Potter had sold some of her artwork for greetings cards and illustrations in the early 1890s, she devoted most of her energy to the study of natural history – archaeology, geology, entomology and, especially, mycology as a scientist. Many scientific drawings are saved and can be viewed on appointment.

The Gardener

At a young age Beatrix Potter loved to draw flowers. No wonder she became a keen gardener and you can still view the famous garden of Hill Top today. It changes every season but you still can recognize the beehive Beatrix Potter drew for The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck and the famous green gate.

Beatrix Potter fell in love with The Lake District and farming. In 1905 she bought Hill Top, her first farm and after her death she bequeathed fifteen farms and over 4,000 acres to the National Trust – a gift which protected and conserved the unique Lake District countryside.

The Preservationist

In 1882 Beatrix Potter and her family began taking their holidays in the Lake District. Country life appealed deeply to Potter and years later she made her home there and wanted to save this land for the future. Beatrix Potter was a genuine preservationist.

The Entrepeneur

Beatrix Potter was far ahead of her time. As a woman in Victorian times it was not custom to do research at Kew Gardens as a scientist, publish your own books, earn money with selling cards or become a savvy business woman and buy land in The Lake District. This, and many more, was done by Beatrix Potter.

Beatrix Potter was more than the creator of Peter Rabbit. She left us a legacy which we still can see and enjoy. Her books, her art, her Herdwick sheep and her indomitable spirit are all part of her enormous legacy.

Places To Visit

Beatrix Potter was born in Victorian London, but there are more related places to visit in the UK and even outside the UK. Beatrix Potter’s original drawings, studies and/or letters are to be found in museums all over the world. Some are on permanent display, others can only be seen by appointment. Please check the website before going. If you are interested in Beatrix Potter as a natural historian and artist, you may like to visit some of these locations.

The Benefits

Become a member.

If you want to know more about Beatrix Potter, you are more than welcome to join The Beatrix Potter Society. We welcome new Members worldwide.

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Our Community

Discover latest news & events, brunch with beatrix potter.

The Beatrix Potter Society has members worldwide. This is also the case in Australia. Our Australian Liaison Officer, Lynne, was recently invited to talk about Beatrix Potter on the radio. ABC Adelaide mornings with David Bevan In the ABC Adelaide mornings with David Bevan program she let listeners know that…

Beatrix Potter – The Artist documentary

With a grant from The Linder Foundation, we were able to make a documentary about the work and life of Beatrix Potter. We are very proud of the result! Special thanks to Penguin Random House, The Armitt Museum and Library in Ambleside, the National Trust, the Daito Bunka University in…

Mary Noble Table at Birnam Arts in Scotland

When scientist and botanist Dr Mary Noble (1911-2002) died, The Beatrix Potter Society commissioned a wooden table in her memory and presented it to the Perth Art Gallery in 2004. In 2023, the table was brought to the Beatrix Potter Exhibition at Birnam Arts, another Pertshire institution with which both Dr…

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Beatrix Potter

• Born July 28 , 1866 · South Kensington, London, England, UK
• Died December 22 , 1943 · Sawrey, Cumbria, England, UK (pneumonia and heart disease)
• Birth name Helen Beatrix Potter
• Beatrix Potter was an English writer, illustrator, mycologist and conservationist. She is famous for writing children's books with animal characters such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Potter was born in Kensington, London. Her family was quite rich. She was educated by governesses. She did not have many friends, but she had many pets, including Benjamin and Peter, two rabbits. She spent her holidays in Scotland and the Lake District. There, she began to learn to love nature, plants, and animals, which she carefully painted. When she was around 30, Potter published The Tale of Peter Rabbit. It was very popular. She also became engaged to her publisher Norman Warne. Her parents became angry and separated with her because of this. They did not want her to marry someone who was socially lower than her. However, Warne died before he and Potter could marry. Potter began writing and illustrating children's books full time. She did not have to ask her parents for money anymore because she had money from her books. In time, she bought Hill Top Farm and more land. In her forties, she married William Heelis, a local solicitor. She also began raising sheep and became a farmer, though she continued writing. She published 23 books. Potter did not have any children. She died of heart disease and pneumonia in Near Sawrey, Lancashire on 22 December 1943. Almost all of her money was left to the National Trust. Her books continue to sell well around the world, in many different languages. Her widower died in August 1945. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous
• Spouse William Heelis (October 13, 1913 - December 22, 1943) (her death)
• Wrote her first book, "The Tale of Peter Rabbit," as a letter to a friend's children. She was encouraged by Hardwicke Rawnsley, vicar of Wray Church, to turn it into a book, and she successfully self-published it in 1902. It is believed to be the first picture story book for children.
• In her later years, was also a real estate investor and a breeder of prize-winning Herdwick sheep.
• When she died at age 77, she left 14 farms and 4,000 acres of land to the National Trust.
• "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" sold more than 50,000 copies by 1903; she used her earnings to purchase a field in Near Sawrey, Cumbria, England.
• "The Tailor of Gloucester," published in 1903, was her favorite. This was based on a true story that her cousin, Caroline Hutton, told her.

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The Best Fiction Books » Literary Figures

The best books on beatrix potter, recommended by libby joy.

The Original and Authorised Edition

The Complete Tales: The Original Peter Rabbit Books by Beatrix Potter

In spite of the huge popularity of her work, Beatrix Potter has often been underappreciated as an artist and a writer, argues Libby Joy of the Beatrix Potter Society . Here she chooses five books to help you appreciate Potter's life as an author, artist and pioneering conservationist.

Interview by Benedict King

Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature by Linda Lear

Beatrix Potter's Art: A Selection of Paintings and Drawings by Anne Stevenson Hobbs

Beatrix Potter's Letters by Judy Taylor

Beatrix Potter’s Hedgehogs by Judy Taylor

Beatrix Potter: At Home in the Lake District by Susan Denyer

1 Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature by Linda Lear

2 beatrix potter's art: a selection of paintings and drawings by anne stevenson hobbs, 3 beatrix potter's letters by judy taylor, 4 beatrix potter’s hedgehogs by judy taylor, 5 beatrix potter: at home in the lake district by susan denyer.

B efore we get into your Beatrix Potter book choices, to what do you attribute her perennial appeal? Why do you think she’s been so popular for so long?

Although her stories are not moralizing, they have a purpose and a point, and they have a bit of humour. For a child they can be quite exciting. There’s a page-turning element. Also, her illustrations are exquisite. They are realistic, compared with many other children’s book illustrations.

It has to be said, that for something to be so successful for so long, you also have to have good publicity and good marketing. In the early days, Potter and her publisher were very astute. They cottoned on quite quickly to the importance of publicity and that has continued right up to the present day. You certainly couldn’t fault Frederick Warne, now under the Penguin Random House umbrella, which is as good at publicity for Beatrix Potter as anyone ever was when she was alive.

You’ve touched on the other question I wanted to ask, which is whether there are any underlying themes in her work, or whether it can be read on two levels, one of which might not be immediately obvious to children, but could be enjoyed by adults?

Some of the Tales are definitely written on two levels. They can be very straightforward: ‘here’s a cat, here’s a mouse, and this is what happens when you put the two together’. It’s a funny story and it’s slapstick; I’m thinking of something like The Tale of Miss Moppet . But several of her later books are definitely written on two levels, with a warning that the world is not quite as straightforward or benevolent as you might think. Examples here are The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck , or The Tale of Mr Tod .

“She was indeed obsessed with drawing”

For children, the double layer is often completely beyond them, but it doesn’t matter because the story still works with a beginning, a middle and an end, and an adventure at its heart. But for adults it’s very satisfying because there is a moral element, or an element of danger or of ‘I-told-you-so’ that adds a bit of interest. There is no one universal theme in the books, but there is definitely a second layer in many of the stories. And, to be honest, I would imagine that that’s partly what kept Beatrix Potter herself interested, the idea that she could write something that, on the face of it, was very straightforward, but which was more interesting and funny if you delve deeper. Some of the books are very funny.

I particularly remember being obsessed by Peter Rabbit when I was younger. That was certainly about the world not being quite as safe as you might expect it to be, and also full of brutal and nasty human beings.

Let’s move on to the Beatrix Potter books you’ve chosen for us. The first is Linda Lear’s Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature . Tell us why this is such a good introduction to her life. Also, can you tell us a bit about her life, to get a sense of how she became the person she ended up being? She came from quite an interesting family, I think both her parents were amateur artists and she was an obsessive drawer from a very young age.

She was indeed obsessed with drawing—”I cannot rest, I must draw, however poor the result…” I think that was partly the background that she came from. Drawing and art were acceptable talents for girls to have and I would imagine that most girls her age, with money, would have governesses and would have been learning to draw. That it became an overriding passion for her is probably partly genetic—her parents were both amateur artists and her father was a very keen amateur photographer. There was also a certain amount of art in her background. One of her grandfathers was a philanthropic patron of the arts, for example, and her father collected the work of Randolph Caldecott.

Wasn’t she related to John Everett Millais?

No, she wasn’t related to him, but he was a friend of her father’s. Rupert Potter would take reference photographs for Millais to use when he was painting in his studio or away from his subject. Some of these photographs are now in the National Portrait Gallery. As a result of that, Beatrix Potter met him several times. Her father also used to take her to the Royal Academy and other galleries and exhibitions in London. So, from quite a young age, she was exposed to great master paintings, Rembrandt , Titian and so on, but also to more contemporary artists, like the Pre-Raphaelites. She wasn’t just learning painting and drawing at home, she was able to see what other artists were doing.

This was all made possible by her background. Her parents were extremely wealthy. Both came from the Manchester area and their families had made their money in the cotton trade. The Potters quite liked to play this down, in that they moved to London partly to establish themselves in society. Her father was a barrister by training, though he practised very little. But it was quite difficult for the Potters to be accepted into London society—they came from the north and probably had northern accents, their money had been made in trade and they were nonconformists, which closed off certain avenues.

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They had the money to behave like upper-middle class people, but their background didn’t gain them entry into all the circles that Mrs Potter would have liked to have been let into. They could afford the lovely long summer holidays that the upper classes enjoyed, and they could afford servants, they had a nice house in Kensington, they had a carriage, Beatrix had governesses and they sent their son away to school, but they mixed mostly with other nonconformists and other professionals rather than the real upper classes.

Tell us specifically about Linda Lear’s biography. What is the tale of Beatrix Potter she tells in this book?

Linda Lear’s primary interest is looking at people in relation to the natural world and science. Lear’s first and very successful biography was of Rachel Carson, who fits that bill. In America, she is the ‘go-to’ expert on Rachel Carson. She first came across Beatrix Potter when she discovered that she also had interests in those areas. She was looking for a new subject to write about and, quite by chance, she saw some of Potter’s fungi paintings, which are meticulously detailed and scientifically accurate and very, very beautiful. This completely amazed her and so she began researching Beatrix Potter’s life and discovered that there was a great deal more to her than just The Tale of Peter Rabbit and other little books.

So, her biography started from that point of view, which is why it’s called ‘a life in nature’. She writes about the whole of Beatrix Potter’s life with great insight, but she concentrates very much on the influence of place, the influence of education, and the opportunities that enabled Beatrix Potter to learn through nature, through science and also through her drawing and painting.

She follows this path right through to the last third of Beatrix Potter’s life, which is probably the third that people are least familiar with, when she was living and working as a farmer in the Lake District and had put the little books behind her. Many of her neighbours in the Lake District had no idea until she died, it was the obituaries that revealed the fact that the Mrs Heelis living in their midst and visiting sheep fairs and so on, was actually Beatrix Potter.

“The book is also very good on how such a constrained background produced a woman of such independence and confidence”

Linda Lear has the benefit of being one of the most recent biographers, of course. There are earlier biographies, the first one was by Margaret Lane in 1946, and Judy Taylor’s later one (1986) is very good. But we know so much more now, and a contemporary biographer always has the benefit of everybody else’s research. Linda’s book, published in 2007, is quite long. It’s quite a dense read and the illustrations are in sections, rather than scattered throughout the book, so it is definitely a ‘read’ rather than lots of lovely pictures with a bit of text. But it tells you everything you could possibly need to know about Beatrix Potter in every part of her life and the notes and references are very rewarding.

It’s particularly interesting on her background and the nonconformist side of her family, but it’s also fascinating as a picture of a young girl growing up in Victorian England and making the transition to the twentieth century, living in a strict household, but yearning to be something completely different and, of course, with an unexpected interest in science.  The book is also very good on how such a constrained background produced a woman of such independence and confidence, so totally different from how you would have expected her to have turned out.

You mentioned that she yearned for independence. You also mentioned that she had stopped producing her books by the time she started farming up in the Lake District, where she had quite a large estate. When and why did she stop writing her books and devote herself to farming?

If you divide her life approximately into thirds, in the first third she was a dutiful Victorian daughter, learning a certain amount, but totally educated by governesses or self-educated at home, leading a fairly restricted and isolated life but drawing all the while. She went on holiday with her parents, lovely long holidays to Scotland and later to the Lake District, and she wrote a lot of letters, including to children of her acquaintance.

But by the time she was in her thirties, she realized that the sort of marriage that her parents might have wanted for her was not what she wanted and that she was not the sort of wife that young men were looking for. She was shy, her social life beyond her family and cousins and so on was virtually non-existent, and she didn’t miss it. But she did want independence—to be able to do things for herself which, in those days, was very difficult outside marriage, because daughters were supposed to stay at home with their parents. So, she needed to make some money and that’s where the little books came in.

“She did want independence—to be able to do things for herself which, in those days, was very difficult outside marriage ”

Her last governess, who became her friend, suggested that she might look at the letters that she’d been writing to children with little stories and pictures in them, to see whether they might be something she could turn into books. The writing of the little books really spans from about 1900 until 1913, though there were some later titles. It was a very short time, during which she wrote prolifically and was full of ideas. That’s the second third of her life.

During those years, she started buying land in the Lake District, so her stories became very Lake District-based. The shift from writing to landowning wasn’t really a conscious decision, but she was making money from the books, which she spent on farms and land and then more farms and more land, building up responsibility for it all and being very hands-on.  Then there were interesting things happening in the fields and on the fells—with the sheep, for example. Also her eyesight deteriorated with age, which made doing all the fiddly small illustrations difficult and, gradually, the writing lost out to her farming interests. She wrote very tellingly to her publisher in 1918, saying, “Somehow when one is up to the eyes in work with real live animals it makes one despise paper-book animals…!”

Suddenly she was a full-time farmer. She ended up owning more than 4,000 acres, with something like 15 different farms. She was drawn into the world of an established, respected landowner, with all the responsibilities that go with that, and that was the last third of her life. There was no conscious decision from one day to the next. It was just how her life developed. And, it has to be said, she was still dependent on the royalties from the little books for this life. She understood that she needed the income that they were generating.

But her estate was funded entirely by her own efforts, it wasn’t a result of inheriting her parents’ money?

Let’s move on to Beatrix Potter’s Art by Anne Stevenson Hobbs. Is this book largely just illustrations, or does it actually talk about her development as an artist and how she worked?

There’s a good long introduction in this book which talks about the development of Potter’s art, with quite technical explanations of her drawing and painting technique, as well as discussion on her influences and her subject matter. And it is beautifully produced and illustrated. But the reason I chose a book about her art as one of the five books is that in order to understand Beatrix Potter, it’s very important to realize that she is so much more than just the little books.

Anne’s book has examples of her very early art, what she saw on her holidays in Scotland as a child, through her teenage years when her work is a bit more stylized and we know that she belonged to a drawing society and took diploma exams. Everything is a bit more formal. Several still lifes, for example, are a bit stiff. But Potter was also experimenting with fantasy drawings, illustrating fairy tales, rhymes and fables from a young age, and some of those are lovely. Then, in the 1890s, she made a bit of money from selling designs to companies that made greetings cards.

“It’s possible to follow the trajectory of her life in rather the same way as you would with a biography, but looking at it visually through her own work.”

But all the time she was sketching, and this book also shows that very well—the pages and pages of sketches of rabbits, mice, birds and frogs (most of them her own pets) and of flowers and landscapes. She’s always sketching and so later, when she came to produce the little books (which, of course, are also illustrated in this book), you can see that the illustrations are based on years of observation and drawing. That’s what makes them so accurate.

Later on in her life she painted some wonderful, impressionistic watercolour landscapes of the Lake District in and around the village where she lived.  These are amongst my favourites.

Another very important thing to mention about this book—already touched on in relation to Linda Lear’s biography—is that it shows Beatrix Potter as a natural historian and scientist. In addition to all the sketches of animals and the later landscapes, there are very detailed botanical paintings of flowers, mosses and lichens. And there are the absolutely fantastic fungi paintings. There are several hundred of those and most of them are in the Armitt Library and Museum in the Lake District, while others are in the Perth Museum and Art Gallery. They are a surprise to the majority of people, who know only about Beatrix Potter’s little books, or her connection with the National Trust and her role in the Lake District. Fewer people know about the time in her life when she was making these meticulous, accurate drawings and paintings.

And so all these different aspects of Beatrix Potter are contained in this one book about her art, and with the introduction and the captions it’s possible to follow the trajectory of her life in rather the same way as you would with a biography, but looking at it visually through her own work. Some of that work is absolutely beautiful.

Her drawing on fungi actually led to her publishing academic papers on the subject, didn’t it?

Yes, it did. She was not only very interested and very good at studying fungi, but also became a bit obsessed by it. She believed she had discovered something about the symbiotic relationship between lichens and fungi. I can’t explain it to you perfectly because I am not a scientist, but Linda Lear’s book is very good on this. Potter did some research at Kew Gardens and at the Natural History Museum and she set up her own little laboratory in the basement of the Potters’ house.  Supported by her uncle, the chemist Sir Henry Roscoe, she presented her paper, “On the germination of the spores of Agaricineae” , to the Linnean Society in London.

“At one stage, she had thought she might be able to make money as a scientist”

There are various views about what happened next. The paper was read on her behalf by one of the scientists from Kew Gardens, because women were not admitted to Society meetings. Some sources say that the paper was rejected. But it wasn’t actually rejected out of hand—it was sent back requiring ‘more work’, which was not an uncommon response. People have been quick to say that it was rejected because she was a woman and an amateur and the Linnean Society has been rather vilified as a result. I actually don’t believe that that is quite what happened. I think the members simply asked her to do more work on it, though her sex and lack of training might have had something to do with the way the request was presented. Anyway, for whatever reason, she lost interest, maybe her confidence was dented, or she felt she had been rejected. We don’t know. The paper itself is lost and so are any comments about it, or she didn’t write them down. And it’s clear that her interest in fungi faded away after that and she became more interested in making money from her little books.

I think that, at one stage, she had thought she might be able to make money as a scientist. It became clear to her that she wasn’t going to be able to and she did need to make money. So, she had to look for another way. I think that is probably the simplest way of describing what happened.

She obviously carried on painting after she gave up doing little books, when she was living in the Lake District. Is her entire work pencil sketches or watercolours, or did she paint or create in other mediums?

Let’s go on to the Beatrix Potter’s Letters , edited by Judy Taylor. You’ve already alluded to some of these. Do they largely consist of fan mail, or family and farming, or is it a mixture?

The letters cover every part of her life, really. Judy Taylor has annotated the collection so, where it’s not obvious what a letter is about or to whom it’s written, there is an explanatory note. Judy wrote a number of other books about Beatrix Potter, including her biography, and she became the ‘go-to’ expert for every aspect of Beatrix Potter’s life. This particular edition of her letters goes all the way from one or two surviving letters written when she was a child—you know, ‘Dear Papa, how is the dog?’ (or whatever)—through to some written a few days before she died in 1943. There are letters to fans, to family, to friends and to publishers. Later on, there are letters to farming acquaintances and to the National Trust. There are also letters to American visitors and to children, some of whom she knew and who were the lucky recipients of picture letters, and to children who had written fan mail to her, some of whom she corresponded with for a number of years.

Many of the most interesting letters are where she’s just an ordinary person writing to a friend, when she’s not an author or a farmer or a celebrity. She’s just Beatrix Potter or, as she became, Beatrix Heelis. They remind us that Beatrix Potter was really just like you and me. She was an ordinary person who happened to do some extraordinary things in her life, and the letters run parallel to the biography and to the art, filling out the character and personality of this extraordinary woman.

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I think, to a modern generation, the idea that one person should have written thousands of letters in a life that spanned 77 years is just unthinkable. We’ve probably all written thousands of emails, but that’s not the same and they’re not preserved in the same way. It is astonishing that it is possible to read somebody’s life through the letters that they wrote, and there are hundreds of letters that aren’t published at all, despite another book edited by Taylor, Letters to Children , and a volume of letters to Beatrix Potter’s Americans , selected and edited by Jane Crowell Morse.

She had a huge fan base in the States, did she?

The American side of Potter’s fan base is a very interesting story, resulting partly from America having a very strong tradition of libraries. They had an importance there that they didn’t quite have here. They were the prime introduction to reading and literature for many children and families, and librarians held a rather more respected position there than they tended to enjoy in Britain. It was actually librarians who were the first Americans to visit her in England, and that started in the 1920s. Having guarded her privacy very closely, she was persuaded by her publisher to accept a visit from an American librarian and was surprised to discover a woman of great intelligence and culture, who really appreciated her work for its literary and artistic merits. This was the respected New York librarian, Anne Carroll Moore, who introduced others.

In Britain, Potter felt her books were treated rather like toys by the booksellers, whereas the Americans, she gradually discovered, regarded her with much more respect and really appreciated the literary qualities of her books.

She was flattered, of course. But there is a very interesting parallel to be drawn between Potter—a nonconformist, independent and, as it turned out, freethinking woman in a still quite a repressed English society—with these educated American women from the East Coast, whose ancestors had gone over on the Mayflower and were founding fathers. They were feisty, intelligent and opinionated and she found she could interact on equal terms with them, whereas here in England, class got in the way.  You were an employer or an employee. You were well-bred, or not. None of that intruded with the Americans, so her letters to her American visitors are in many ways very open, and very interesting about England and the war and politics. Fascinating.

It’s interesting what you say about the American libraries. I hadn’t really appreciated that, but I’ve occasionally visited public libraries in some American cities—for instance Chicago—and they’re amazing buildings. The one in Chicago is like a palace, with all these mosaics and huge improving quotes from Milton and Shakespeare scattered around the walls. It’s an absolutely extraordinary place and you really get the sense that it’s been built as a temple of learning.

In New York and in Philadelphia—it’s probably the same in Chicago—you have the central library, but the libraries elsewhere in the city are part of the same organization. In the UK, our libraries tend to be more independent from each other. But a library in a suburb of New York is still linked to the New York Public Library and it’s the same with the Free Library of Philadelphia. I think it’s still the case now that libraries are more important in America than they are here. An extraordinary percentage of the Beatrix Potter Society members in America—it’s celebrating its 40th anniversary this year—are actually librarians or in some way connected with librarianship, perhaps where it overlaps with primary education.

“In Britain Potter felt her books were treated rather like toys by the booksellers, whereas the Americans…regarded her with much more respect and really appreciated the literary qualities of her books”

This digression illustrates a point about the letters, actually, which is that if you’re reading what somebody has written about their life in this way, it sends you off in lots of different directions beyond their life and work. They act as a social-history springboard into all sorts of other areas that you wouldn’t necessarily have thought about, but which can be very interesting.

Absolutely. The death of letter writing is a huge tragedy for future historians.

On that melancholy note, let’s move on to Beatrix Potter’s Hedgehogs . This is a publication by The Beatrix Potter Society. What was it about Beatrix Potter and hedgehogs?

This book is Judy Taylor again. The original idea for it was to celebrate Judy’s 80th birthday. Over the years and all over the world she gave talks about Beatrix Potter on many different subjects and we chose one of her unpublished talks to make into a little booklet. The Society has produced all sorts of publications over its 40 years, but for a choice of five books like this most of them are a bit too specialised, because they tend to be collections of the Society’s international conference papers, for example. Hedgehogs is a subject that’s of interest to everybody and the talk is reasonably lighthearted as well as informative. It’s suitable for a birthday and it celebrates Judy Taylor, without whom we would know much less about Beatrix Potter than we do.

What’s interesting about it to the general reader is that it illustrates everything we’ve been talking about up to now in one short little 24-page illustrated booklet. It starts with Beatrix Potter’s interest in hedgehogs from the natural history point of view and her observations about them in nature and in real life. She had a pet hedgehog called Mrs Tiggy, whom she wrote about in letters to children and sketched and whose behaviour she examined. When she started writing her little books, one of them included a hedgehog based partly on Mrs Tiggy and this became The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle . So, straight away you’ve got the transfer from real life to little-book life, which is the pattern that nearly all the little books followed.

“She had a pet hedgehog called Mrs Tiggy, whom she wrote about in letters to children and sketched and whose behaviour she examined”

The booklet illustrates every aspect of Beatrix Potter’s own interests, but it also goes on to show how incredibly astute she was as a businesswoman, and there are examples here of her marketing ideas. And, although Mrs Tiggy-Winkle is an early book [1905] and was written before Potter really became a farmer or a landowner in the Lake District, it is set in the Lake District with all the background in the pictures based on sketches made during a Lake District holiday.

Finally, Beatrix Potter at Home in the Lake District by Susan Denyer. I’m interested to understand how she ended up getting so attached to the Lake District. But, anyway, what story does this book tell?

I realized that we needed a book that concentrated a bit more on the on the later part of her life. There’s quite a lot of detailed work available about her farming interests and the sheep and everything, which I didn’t think was suitable for our purposes, and Linda Lear’s book covers this very well. But a positive about Susan Denyer’s book is that Denyer herself worked for the National Trust for a long time and is very knowledgeable about the topography and culture of the Lake District as well as its agriculture.

There’s an element of all those in this book. But, basically, it’s also an introduction to the Lake District on a more superficial level, and to Beatrix Potter’s involvement there, and it is beautifully illustrated, with some stunning photography.

For many years the Potters went to Scotland for their summer holidays. But in 1882 the house they took in Perthshire, Dalguise, was no longer available. Beatrix was 16 and they rented Wray Castle, a house in the Lake District. That was the family’s first Lake District holiday, which they all enjoyed, and thereafter they tended to spend their holidays there, either around Derwentwater or Windermere.

“She felt herself to be a northerner—something she probably embroidered a little bit”

I think there are two reasons for Beatrix Potter’s interest in the area. One is the fact that she spent happy holidays there and thought the landscape was very beautiful. But also, although she was born in London, she hated it and it made her ill. Her family had originally come from the north and, as she grew older, she put more emphasis on her northern roots. They became more and more important to her. Perhaps they also helped her to explain why she never really settled in London or in London society. She felt herself to be a northerner—something she probably embroidered a little bit.

After she had been living in the Lake District for 20 years and had already bought quite a lot of land and farms, a particular estate, called Monk Coniston, came up for sale, and included a small farm that had once belonged to her great-grandfather on her father’s mother’s side, Abraham Crompton. He had been a wealthy merchant in Lancashire and had bought Holme Ground as a holiday house several generations previously. It was no longer in the family and Potter liked the idea of buying it back.

Denyer’s book describes Potter’s holidays, her growing love for the area, her first purchases, including Hill Top Farm, and her other farms in the Windermere area.  Also her interest in farming practices—in sheep, in learning to understand the cycle of the farming year and the different ways of dealing with the land. All that became a great passion for her and she sought advice from local people and built up a reputation as a respected breeder of sheep. It’s a fascinating end to a life that started so differently. She almost reinvented herself, really, as a respected farmer and sheep breeder and there’s a strong element of conservation and stewardship there, as well, which Linda Lear’s biography discusses clearly.

I wanted to ask you about that because I think it’s a fascinating aspect of the whole story. She left all her land to the National Trust. She was clearly very worried about that part of the world being developed and losing its character which, given that she died in 1943, seems to be quite prescient. Can you tell us a bit about her life as a conservationist?

Potter was introduced to the National Trust right at its very inception because her father was one of its first members. As a family, they knew Hardwicke Rawnsley, who was one of the three founders of the National Trust. They met him in the Lake District in 1882 and he was a great influence on Potter, teaching her a lot about Lake District traditions and history, and how to read the landscape and to appreciate its local character. So that was ingrained in her from a very young age.

As she got older and became a landowner herself, she became aware of the threat to the Lake District from development, from holiday chalets and houses in particular, and from the expansion of the railway and roads. She also saw a threat from the Forestry Commission, who would plant up great swathes of hillside with conifers. So, there was a double threat; the development threat tended to be in the valleys and on the low-lying land around the railways and the roads, and the forestry threat was more widespread on the hills.

“She ended up owning more than 4,000 acres, with something like 15 different farms.”

So a strong motivation for buying land in the beginning was to protect it from development. There’s one particular estate she bought, Troutbeck Park, which is in a beautiful valley with the fells going up around it and behind it. There was prime development land in the bottom of the valley because it was easily accessible from both Windermere and Ambleside and from the railway, which already came to Windermere. She was desperate to stop the valley being built over and developed, so she bought it, which she was lucky enough to be able to do.

There’s an interesting contradiction here, and I’m not sure that it’s been fully researched yet, which is that Potter understood that the Lake District needed visitors and tourists and so on, and she understood that the National Trust had a role to play in that as well, but she also understood that you couldn’t just have development willy-nilly. I suspect she was a bit ‘not-in-my-backyard’ to a certain extent, but she didn’t actually stop people going onto her land. She complained about coach tours and people who didn’t understand about shutting gates and so on, but she wasn’t against them completely. I suppose it’s the same contradiction that continues today between landowners and farmers and members of the public.

It’s the classic upper-class tourist complaint. When she was young and very rich, hardly anyone was going on holiday to the Lake District. It seemed fine that a few people like her did, but when lots of people started doing it, it ruined the fun.

The Lake District is very accessible, particularly from Liverpool and Manchester, and there was a great move, which was partly tied up with the National Trust, to make green spaces available for the factory workers, who needed somewhere they could go for a day trip or for a holiday, and to encourage them go there.

But, although Potter started out wanting to preserve the Lake District, she actually found the whole business of farming and landowning and so on interesting. And, as with everything else she had done in her life in its various stages, she wanted to know about it—to learn about it, and to be productive and useful and good at it. So, she taught herself as much as she could about breeding sheep (Herdwicks in particular) or cattle and grazing, and she was fairly modern in some ways, getting rid of diseases and so on and following new agricultural practices. (She allowed electricity in farm buildings, though not in her own house!) She was also very astute at picking the best people to come and work for her and she had no qualms about poaching the good shepherd from a neighbouring farm if he was the person to improve her sheep flock. And, if she could pay him a slightly better wage and offer him a slightly nicer house and perhaps offer his wife some work, then all was fair in love and war, as it were.

Is her estate in the Lake District still run pretty much as she left it, or have economic pressures forced changes on it?

Her Lake District bequest to the National Trust is mostly preserved as she wanted, in that her farms are still farmed, with a stock of Herdwick sheep where appropriate, and Hill Top house is still a place to visit exactly as it was when she left it. However, there have been some changes and one or two of the farms have had to be merged lately.  Every time this happens there is a row between those who think that her will should be observed exactly and those who think that the National Trust must be free to make changes, given the current economic and farming climates.

I would say that her legacy is doing pretty well and that, were she to come back now, she would recognize most of it. But there have had to be changes because the National Trust has to make money and be solvent, like the rest of us.

So I’m not in the camp that thinks it’s wrong for them to make any changes at all, and I think the public has to trust them to make changes as near as possible to those that Potter would have understood herself. If I have any quibble with the National Trust and what it does with her legacy, I would say it’s more to do with—commercialisation is the wrong word—a bit of dumbing down and a tendency to market her as a bit twee, which she wasn’t at all. That was one thing she wasn’t. But, on the whole, I would say they’ve done a pretty good job in very difficult circumstances.

Finally, what’s the Beatrix Potter Society’ s role in running her estate?

None—that role falls either to her publishers, Frederick Warne, or to the National Trust. The Beatrix Potter Society is a registered charity and an appreciation society, a literary society. It was founded by people who were already involved in her legacy, working with the Potter collections left to the V&A. Increasingly, people would ask whether there was a Beatrix Potter Society and so, eventually, one was founded in 1980. The Society holds conferences and meetings, but it is also a forum for sharing information about Beatrix Potter, researching into her life and work and publishing its findings.  It also produces a Journal and Newsletter three times a year and has an e-newsletter, a website and active social media platforms.

Times are tricky now because people can find information about Beatrix Potter on the internet without having to join the Society. So it has fewer members, which means less income and it is short of volunteers. Those who used to have time to volunteer are few and far between now and it is difficult to find people prepared to do this in quite the same way as before.

And, of course, a number of the older, long-standing members are not particularly keen on the internet and some of them don’t even have access to it. The move for a lot of similar societies—and in life in general—is online. But if you’re in your 80s or 90s online is not necessarily an option that is open to you. So there’s a permanent tension between going online to save money and reduce costs and to reach a new audience, and worrying about depriving some members of access to material by doing that. So far the balancing act is working and, thanks to its hardworking Committee, the Society has done well to reach its fortieth year, despite pandemic restrictions.  It has members all over the world, from the UK and America to Japan and Australia, and it’s a great source of joy and interest to a lot of people, as well as a valuable resource for anyone interested in Beatrix Potter.

August 12, 2020

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Libby Joy is a former chairman and trustee of the Beatrix Potter Society . A freelance editor, she has worked on Beatrix Potter-related books and projects with various publishers and authors for more than thirty years. She continues to work on the Society's publications, as well as editing its Journal and Newsletter .

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She invented Peter Rabbit, then used the money to buy acres of sheep

A beatrix potter exhibition at the morgan library is about more than just storybooks.

NEW YORK — As a boy, I never had much regard for the storybooks written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter in the first decades of the 20th century. Her watercolors were treacly and her tales too simple-minded and rustic. I lived in a world of plastic and plenitude; what use did I have for wayward rabbits, riddling squirrels and foppish frogs? I preferred the brighter and bolder books of Dr. Seuss, whose humor was sharper to my ear, satirizing the fragility, chaos and absurdity just under the surface of daily life when America was at the apex of her postwar power.

The Style section

I have long since changed my mind, and anyone who is wavering in their antipathy to the domestic and agrarian idylls of Potter should visit the Morgan Library, where a smart and compelling exhibition, “ Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature ,” paints her as a multidimensional talent. It surveys her work as an artist and author of children’s books, beginning with the 1902 release of “ The Tale of Peter Rabbit .” But it also covers the larger trajectory of her life, from her privileged middle-class childhood in London to her later years as a farmer, preservationist and advocate for the landscape she loved best, the Lake District of England .

That larger perspective helps clarify the peculiar mix of charm and unsentimental menace in her work, a sense that there are worlds not quite contiguous with our own, subject to friction and conflict when they come into contact. That friction can be potentially deadly, whether it is a rabbit stuck in garden netting or tempting fate from a farmer’s gun (at the cost of its whiskers and tail). It can also be comic, and often it is hard to tell where the comedy levels off and the potential tragedy begins.

Consider an admonition to avoid the garden of Mr. McGregor delivered to Peter and his siblings in the opening pages of “Peter Rabbit”: “Your father had an accident there. He was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor.” And then we see, like one of the guests at the banquet of Titus Andronicus, Mr. McGregor with his knife and fork poised over a steaming, rabbit-size pie.

The understatement — “father had an accident” — suggests this is a comic moment, as does the skeptical look on the farmer’s face and the reference to Shakespeare. But for the rabbits, it’s a dark memory of trauma and loss. So, too, in “The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck” (1908), a scene in which a naive and attractive young fowl is seduced into the clutches of a wily fox seems comic, yet it is gendered to feel like the setup for rape.

The menace in Potter’s work feels different from the usual dark allegories in classic fairy tales. Part of the distinction lies in Potter’s drawings, which are never incidental or merely illustrations of the text. As the exhibition demonstrates, Potter’s storybook illustrations were informed by her deep observation of the natural world. Well before she invented Peter Rabbit — in a private 1893 letter sent to the 5-year-old son of her former governess — Potter was making detailed and meticulous drawings of plants, animals and mushrooms. By the late 1880s, she had evolved into a sophisticated amateur mycologist, and in 1897, one of her scientific papers was read at the Linnaean Society in London (read by a man, because women were not allowed to present their own work).

The primary difference between the animal drawings she made before her literary career and the illustrations for her children’s books is the addition of sharper contour lines, as if going over a shaded watercolor with a little ink clarifies the transition from the real world to children’s fantasy. That roughing in of a few sharper edges parallels the addition of Victorian moralism to the animal world. Her rabbits, kittens, mice and squirrels are anthropomorphized, but there is a ruthless, survival-of-the-fittest ethos always in the background, creating a surreal fusion of quaint, cozy English domesticity and stern, Darwinian rigor.

Some might say that is the definition of England at the height of its empire: well-mannered, gracious and comfortable for those at the apex; brutal for everyone below. And if you want to read Potter that way, there’s plenty of ammunition. The impertinent Squirrel Nutkin, who plagues a taciturn old owl with incessant riddles and rhymes, doesn’t know his place in the natural hierarchy. His punishment: He loses his tail and, apparently, his ability to speak. Among the prerogatives of power is policing the right to be heard and communicate in our preferred language. The exhibition includes not only original artwork from the 1903 “Tale of Squirrel Nutkin,” but also a 1905 letter in which Nutkin implores Old Brown, the owl, to return his tail.

And then there’s the life of privilege that Potter enjoyed. Her discovery of the natural world came, in part, during long vacations taken in the countryside, including weeks in the spring when her London house was cleaned. The wealth she gained from writing children’s books — and selling Potter merchandise including board games, dolls and figurines — enabled her to buy vast tracts of farmland in the Lake District, where she did what wealthy city folk generally do in the country: create a fantasy of rugged domesticity, with a mix of rustic furniture, rare antiques and art. She aligned her identity with the people she found there, joining what William Wordsworth called a “perfect republic of shepherds.” She tended vast herds of sheep and imagined that her family’s mercantile bloodline was hearty and resilient, just like her ewes.

If this caricature of her life and work annoys you, as it does me, how do we redeem Potter sufficiently to indulge the charms of her palm-sized books?

For me, the revelation was roadkill, the small, furry carcasses of dead animals one finds alongside almost any highway built through fields, forest or farmland. I have at least once contributed to this slaughter, and it was an agonizing experience. You realize the cost and toll your existence takes upon the world, a world that never asked to intersect with yours. Human beings crash through nature, break it apart and leave it in ruins, just to make supper by 6 p.m.

Your only hope of keeping the agony of this realization at bay is to endeavor to be gentler and better in the tiny scope of things under your control. The literary critic Edward Said argued that many of the great novels of the 18th and 19th centuries were a symptom of imperialism, and the books of Beatrix Potter may well extend that discourse to children. But they are more than that. They enact a decency independent of their larger, historical implications. And only an author keenly attuned not just to nature, but also to man’s discordant place in it, could be so clear-eyed about the inescapable pathos of animal life.

If overthinking kids’ books annoys you, as it does me, one final thought: In the second room of the exhibition, the designers have created a kind of window seat to mimic the interior of a home that might resemble one Potter lived in. Sitting in it when I visited was a boy, about 10 or 12 years old, reading “The Tale of Ginger and Pickles” (1909), which tells of two predatory creatures, a tomcat and a terrier, who operate a shop frequented by their natural prey, rabbits and mice. The shopkeepers, salivating, struggle to focus on business: “It would never do to eat our own customers,” says Pickles the terrier.

If the boy had a cellphone, he didn’t look at it once.

Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature is on view at the Morgan Library in New York through June 9. themorgan.org .

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