Potter, Beatrix

Beatrix Potter, in full Helen Beatrix Potter, (born July 28, 1866, South Kensington, Middlesex [now in Greater London], England—died December 22, 1943, Sawrey, Lancashire [now in Cumbria]), English author of children’s books, who created Peter Rabbit, Jeremy Fisher, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, and other animal characters.

Potter, the only daughter of heirs to cotton fortunes, spent a solitary childhood, enlivened by long holidays in Scotland or the English Lake District, which inspired her love of animals and stimulated her imaginative watercolour drawings. On one of these holidays in Scotland, at age 27, she sent an illustrated animal story to a sick child of a former governess, about four bunnies named Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter. The illustrated letter was so well received that she decided to privately publish it as The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901). In 1902 it was published commercially with great success by Frederick Warne & Company, which in the next 20 years brought out 22 additional books, beginning with The Tailor of Gloucester (1903), The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903), and The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904). The tiny books, which she designed so that even the smallest children could hold them, combined a deceptively simple prose, concealing dry North Country humour, with illustrations in the best English watercolour tradition. (In old age, as her sight deteriorated, she lost much of her freshness of vision, and her last few stories, written for publication in the United States, did not match her earlier work in style or draftsmanship.)

During her summer trips with her parents, Potter also closely studied fungi, of which she made detailed drawings; she wrote a paper on spore germination that was read before the Linnean Society in 1897. Despite strong parental opposition, she became engaged in 1905 to Norman Warne, the son of her publisher, and after his sudden death a few months later she spent much of her time alone at Hill Top, a small farm in the village of Sawrey in the Lake District, bought with the proceeds of a legacy and the royalties from her books. In 1913 she married her solicitor, William Heelis, and spent the last 30 years of her life extending her farm property and breeding Herdwick sheep. She bequeathed her land to the National Trust, which maintains the Hill Top farmhouse as it was when she lived in it.