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Clearly she was talented. And Miss Potter had many friends. But they didn’t look like you and me. She and her younger brother, Bertram, had lots of pets, including lizards, water newts, a frog, a bat and a snake. But probably her favorites were her rabbits. The first one, named Benjamin Bouncer, liked to eat hot, buttered toast. Peter Piper, her Belgian buck rabbit, liked to lie on the rug in front of the fireplace, like a cat. She taught him to do tricks. Miss Potter spent many hours studying her animals, and even at a young age she sketched and painted pictures of them. When you spend that long on something, wonderful things can happen: These animals were such a big part of Miss Potter’s life that her pictures of them came to life. Not really, you might say, but Miss Potter seemed to think so. She gave her characters fanciful names and dressed them in fanciful clothes and talked with them about their adventures. She told some of these tales in letters to human friends. Later, she introduced her animal friends to a wider audience, putting them on greeting cards sold in London. Miss Potter’s illustrations were published for the first time in an 1890 booklet of verse called A Happy Pair. (The poet, Frederick Weatherly, would later become known for writing the Irish ballad Danny Boy, but that’s a story for another day.) Twelve years later she published her own book, a simple but beautiful edition that featured her watercolors of a family of rabbits. You might remember them: Their names were Peter Rabbit, Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail, and the book was The Tale of Peter Rabbit. That Miss Potter, who was then 36, was able to publish this book at all was no small feat in early-1900s England. Women then were expected to marry at a young age and raise families. But Miss Potter’s tale was far from over. She published 22 more children’s books. The last one, The Tale of Little Pig Robinson, came out in 1930. In all, her little adventures have sold more than 150 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages! Miss Potter became wealthy, and she used her money to help preserve the countryside she loved. When she died in 1943, she left 14 farms, flocks of sheep and 4,000 acres to a charity that protects land and historic buildings in Britain. She also left a treasure of stories and paintings, so Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny, Jemima Puddle-Duck and Tabitha Twitchit, Mr. Jeremy Fisher and Mrs. Tiggywinkle continue to come alive for young children and their parents. — LAT/WP
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HER name was Beatrix
Potter. From the time she was 15, Miss Potter recorded her everyday life
in journals written in a secret code. She also made detailed drawings of
plants, fungi and insects, and she later painted landscapes of the
countryside.