When Peter Rabbit stamps . . .

‘The bride is a successful exhibitor at local agricultural shows of short-horn cattle and her name is known now all over the country for those charming books for children …’ Thus the Westmorland Gazette announced the marriage of Beatrix Potter and William Heelis in 1913. Beatrix would have concurred with the Gazette’s sense of priorities. Though she took pride and pleasure in her ‘little books’ and defended their merit — ‘There is more in the books than mere funniness’ — one feels that she would have relished being the first woman president of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association more than her acclaim as a best-selling author.

Linda Lear’s solid biography is even-handed in its treatment of Potter’s achievements as author, artist, farmer and conservationist. She points out that if Potter had been born male she could have been an expert in archaeology, botany, ornithology, mycology, geology, entomology and more. The story of Potter’s oppressed girlhood is well known. Her intelligent but overbearing father and her miserable snob of a mother exercised a shocking degree of control over their daughter. Beatrix recorded her woes in a secret journal not deciphered until after her death. She was allowed few companions and no personal freedom, but she was allowed to keep a surprising variety of creatures — bats, lizards and toads as well as the more usual rabbits and mice — in the schoolroom of her ‘unloved birthplace’, 2 Bolton Gardens, Kensington. She studied their behaviour and appearance in minute detail. Her precocious talent for drawing and her extraordinary powers of observation made her pictures useful scientific documents, though their value was unrecognised by the all-male hierarchy of late Victorian natural historians. ‘Now of all hopeless things to draw I should think the very worst is a fine fat fungus,’ wrote Beatrix aged 26 in 1892, but her studies of fungi are so accurate that modern mycologists still refer to them for purposes of identification.