Beatrix Potter

English · 1866 to 1943

Born Helen Beatrix Potter on July 28, 1866, in South Kensington, London, she was the elder child of a wealthy, unitarian family who lived on inherited cotton money and kept their daughter in third-floor nurseries with a succession of pet mice, rabbits, and a hedgehog. Educated entirely at home by governesses, she filled sketchbooks with watercolours of fungi, fossils, and small animals, and produced a serious mycological study of spore germination that the Linnean Society heard read aloud in 1897, since women could not attend. The turning point came in 1893, when she sent a picture letter to a sick child, Noel Moore, the son of a former governess, about four little rabbits named Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter. Privately printed in 1901 after publishers declined it, The Tale of Peter Rabbit was issued by Frederick Warne and Company in 1902 and sold rapidly. She followed it with The Tailor of Gloucester (1903), The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903), The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904), The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle (1905), and The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck (1908). She patented a Peter Rabbit doll, among the first licensed literary merchandise. Engaged to her editor Norman Warne, who died of leukaemia weeks later in 1905, she used her royalties to buy Hill Top Farm at Near Sawrey in the Lake District. In 1913 she married the solicitor William Heelis and became a respected breeder of Herdwick sheep. She died at Castle Cottage on December 22, 1943, aged seventy-seven, having bequeathed over four thousand acres to the National Trust, the largest gift the Trust had then received.