Biography: The most detailed biography of the children's writer to date shows there was more to her than flopsy bunnies.
More than most people's, Beatrix Potter's life is defined by two distinct modes of characterisation. She is celebrated as the London author and illustrator of a series of enchanting small children's books, beginning with The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902. She is also, under her married name of Beatrix Heelis, remembered as a sturdy North Country fell farmer and sheep-breeder, whose bequest to the National Trust ensured the survival of a great part of the Lake District in a more or less unadulterated state. There seems to be something of a gulf separating one of these biographical images from the other. But in fact the transition from Pigling Bland to bacon pigs occurred gradually, and without any great drama or upheaval. Patience and perseverance, qualities Beatrix Potter possessed in abundance, enabled her story, like Anne Elliot's in Persuasion, to "come right" in the end.
Now with the film of her life, Miss Potter, starring Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, opening on January 5th, many more people, children and adults, may come under her spell via the silver screen.
Beatrix Potter was born in South Kensington in 1866, into a wealthy Unitarian family with North Country roots. A lot has been written about her solitary and not especially happy childhood in Bolton Gardens, in a household complete with the usual accoutrements of butler, cook, parlour-maid and so forth, and in which an undeviating routine was observed. Beatrix was in the charge of a nurse and then a governess; she had cousins, but friendships with neighbourhood children were not encouraged; and, up until the birth of her brother Bertram in 1872, she was an only child. Her first biographer, Margaret Lane, has left an image of a cooped-up little girl in her Alice-in-Wonderland garb gazing intently through the barred windows of the third-floor nursery of the house in Bolton Gardens, an image, says her current biographer Linda Lear - who disputes the existence of the window bars - which has generally "been accepted as both fact and as a metaphor characterising Potter's psychological formation".
The truth, Lear asserts, is rather more complex than this suggests; she goes on to cover, at considerable length, the ingredients of an upbringing that had drawing and painting as one inestimable resource, and the eventual companionship of a brother who shared her interest in nature study as another. If Potter's scholarly and imaginative gifts made her something of a misfit in upper middle-class Kensington, there were regular, protracted holidays at rented country houses in Scotland or the Lake District, in which her powers of observation and absorption in the natural world were able to flourish.
Among her earliest bugbears, it's true, was a mother whose conservative, querulous and demanding nature constituted a trial for her daughter until she, Helen Potter, finally gave up the ghost at the age of 92; but Beatrix's father Rupert emerges as a slightly more sympathetic figure, at least up until the point when he too succumbs to ill-health accompanied by ill-temper.
She has other mentors, in any case. One of the really striking things about Beatrix Potter is the prescience she showed with regard to certain activities and issues, including conservation, which has such enormous relevance today. Canon Rawnsley, whom the Potters had met at Lake Windermere in 1882, impressed Beatrix with his views on jerry-building and the desecration of the countryside, and remained a strong influence until his death many years later. And her uncle by marriage, Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe, encouraged her botanical researches when she was 20 or 21 and deeply engaged in studying the properties of fungi. The outcome of these researches was a paper read at the Linnean Society in 1897 - but not read by Beatrix, who wasn't even present, since women were barred not only from membership, but even from attendance. It's hard to understand why this kind of treatment didn't make a feminist of her, but no, she "disapproved of the women's suffrage campaign", we're told, a stance that can only relate to some residue brushing off on her from the strictness of Bolton Gardens and its emphasis on duty. Beatrix Potter was a dutiful daughter, indeed, but at the same time she harboured a covert subversiveness that saved her from the inertia of the era and the ennui of unwed domestic life. This subversive streak gained a few unexpected outlets, among them an enterprise involving a succession of invigorating tales featuring endearing small animals.
THE STORY OF the genesis of Peter Rabbit is well known. Racking her brains for something to amuse the infant son of her ex-governess, Beatrix Potter began an illustrated letter with the words, ". . . I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter."
These words were auspicious. They netted their author a publisher, the firm of Warne, and later a fiancé from the same firm, Norman Warne (the tragedy was that he died unexpectedly before they could be married), whose proposal she accepted in the face of opposition from her parents. (Some of the oddity of the Potter household may be inferred from the fact that Beatrix's brother Bertram was happily married for 11 years before he got around to mentioning it at Bolton Gardens.)
The success of the "little books" - Peter Rabbit was followed by Squirrel Nutkin, Jeremy Fisher and so on - plus a legacy from an aunt, enabled Beatrix Potter to acquire a farm, Hill Top, near the village of Sawrey in the Lake District. It brought her a stage closer to her chosen way of life, but, for a number of years, she - still the dutiful daughter - had to divide her time between Bolton Gardens and the north.
In 1913, once again without her parents' approval, she embarked on a long and harmonious marriage to a local North Country solicitor, William Heelis. By the time the last of the genuine little books came out in 1918, Beatrix Potter was immersed in agriculture, property management and an avant-garde appreciation of country furnishings, and had nearly completed the transfer of enthusiasm from drawing squirrels to breeding sheep. Subsequent writings were undertaken less for pleasure (unlike the early books) than for some extraneous purpose, such as saving her publisher Frederick Warne from bankruptcy following his arrest on a charge of forgery.
The effect of this and other contretemps is energetically recounted by Linda Lear. Hers is not the first Potter biography, but it is the most lavishly detailed and conscientiously explicatory. It is densely and, for the most part, happily written (there are lapses; I don't think we want to hear so much about Beatrix Potter's "powerlessness" as a Victorian daughter, and I don't for a moment believe that Beatrix Potter herself, a natural stylist, wrote "alright").
It gets to grips with the intricacies of a subject who fits into the tradition of rural English eccentricity - striding about the hills in her rough tweed suits, with an old potato sack thrown across her shoulders, and a felt hat held in place by a strip of elastic going under the chin - but whose legacy to the world of children's literature carries a bracing touch of urbanity alongside its nursery charm.
Patricia Craig is a critic and biographer. Her Ulster Anthology has just been published by Blackstaff
Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature By Linda Lear Allen Lane, 554pp. £25