Helen Beatrix Potter (1866 - 1943) was an English author, illustrator, natural scientist, and conservationist best known for her imaginative children's books featuring animals such as those in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which celebrated the British landscape and country life.
Potter was born into a wealthy Unitarian family. She and her younger brother Walter Bertram (1872-1918) grew up with few friends outside their large extended family. Her parents were artistic, interested in nature, and enjoyed the countryside.
As children, Beatrix and Bertram had numerous small animals as pets which they observed closely and drew endlessly. Summer holidays were spent away from London, in Scotland and in the English Lake District where Beatrix developed a love of the natural world which was the subject of her painting from an early age.
She was educated by private governesses until she was 18. Her study of languages, literature, science, and history was broad and she was an eager student. Her artistic talents were recognized early. She enjoyed private art lessons and developed her own style, favouring watercolour. She illustrated insects, fossils, archaeological artifacts, and fungi, along with her drawings of her animals, real and imagined.
In the 1890s, her mycological illustrations and research into the reproduction of fungus spores generated interest from the scientific establishment.
Following some success illustrating cards and booklets, Potter wrote and illustrated The Tale of Peter Rabbit, publishing it first privately in 1901, and a year later as a small, three-colour illustrated book with Frederick Warne & Co. She became unofficially engaged to her editor Norman Warne in 1905, despite the disapproval of her parents, but he died suddenly a month later of leukemia.
With the proceeds from the books and a legacy from an aunt, Potter bought Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey, a tiny village, then in Lancashire, the English Lake District near Windermere, in 1905. Over the following decades, she purchased additional farms to preserve the unique hill country landscape. In 1913, at the age of 47, she married William Heelis, a respected local solicitor from Hawkshead.
Potter was also a prize-winning breeder of Herdwick sheep and a prosperous farmer keenly interested in land preservation. She continued to write and illustrate, and to design spin-off merchandise based on her children's books for Warne..
