Beatrix Potter

Biography
(1866–1943)

Helen Beatrix Potter was an English writer, illustrator and a natural scientist. She was born into an
upper-middle-class household and spent a solitary childhood, also Potter was educated by
governesses. Both Beatrix and her younger brother Bertram loved to draw mostly their numerous
pets, which they observed in Scotland – where they spent their summer holidays. Her both parents
had artistic interests and this is how Beatrix got to know some influential artists and writers.
Her earliest artist models were her pet rabbits. She started to study fungi at the Royal Botanical
Gardens in Kew and by 1896, she wrote a paper, ‘On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae’,
but it was never published. In the late 1870s, she began studying at the National Art Training School.
Potter got successful at first by selling greeting cards and one of them The tale of Peter Rabbit – a
picture letter, she transformed into a book, which was published privately by her in 250 copies. That’s
how Beatrix Potter began writing and illustrating children's books full-time.
In 1902, Frederick Warne & Co. made a new edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit and it was an
immediate bestseller. In 1903 Potter designed the first Peter Rabbit doll and made Peter Rabbit the
world’s oldest licensed literary character. The same year, Beatrix published The Tale of Squirrel
Nutkin and The Tailor of Gloucester, then The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (1903) and The Tale of
Benjamin Bunny (1904). She found Norman Warne who worked as her editor but sadly proposed to
her a few weeks before he died. That same year (1906) Potter bought Hill Top Farm in the Lake
District and she continued writing. Potter wrote thirty books in her lifetime.
At the age of 47 she married William Heelis, a local solicitor who assisted her property dealings.
After this she only produced a few more books and The Tale of Little Pig Robinson (1930) was her
final children's book. Her main focus became the land and breeding sheeps.
At her home Potter died of pneumonia on 22 December 1943, leaving fifteen farms and over four
thousand acres of land to the National Trust, where her artwork was displayed until 1985 and then it
was moved to William Heelis's former law offices in Hawkshead. She left behind a journal in code,
which was cracked and published in 1966 as The journal of Beatrix Potter.