Beatrix Potter
Beatrix Potter is an author.
Potter grew up in an upper-middle-class household, educated by governesses and kept largely away from other children, with pets and long holidays in Scotland and the Lake District for company. What she did with that isolation was look closely at things. Her watercolours of fungi were serious enough to earn her respect among mycologists, and the same habit of exact observation is why her rabbits sit correctly on the page.
She was in her thirties before The Tale of Peter Rabbit found a commercial publisher in 1902, having printed it herself first. It worked immediately and she turned professional. There are twenty-three of the little tales in all, books sized for small hands, in which animals wear clothes and then behave with complete animal self-interest. Peter raids a garden and nearly pays for it, Jemima Puddle-Duck takes advice from an obviously untrustworthy gentleman, Tom Kitten ruins his outfit inside a page.
She was also, and the gentle version of her story tends to leave this out, a formidable commercial operator. In 1903 Peter Rabbit became the first fictional character made into a patented soft toy, which makes him the oldest licensed character there is. Her books have since sold more than 250 million copies. The nursery reputation is therefore slightly misleading: she was an author, an illustrator, a working naturalist and a licensor, and she was ahead of her publishers on the last of those.
Books (8)
Where to start with Beatrix Potter
The Tale of Peter Rabbit first, obviously, and it holds up for a reason people rarely state out loud: it is genuinely tense. A small animal inside a walled garden belonging to a man who wants to eat him is a real predicament, and Potter refuses to soften the arithmetic.
After that, follow the sequels rather than the fame. The Tale of Benjamin Bunny and The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies continue the same family and get funnier as the stakes get sillier. The Tale of Tom Kitten is the domestic comedy of the set, and The tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck carries real menace under the bonnet and shawl, a fox story delivered with a straight face.
The tale of Samuel Whiskers, or, The roly-poly pudding is the strangest and the best written, an old dark house told at cat height. For the adult Potter, The journal of Beatrix Potter from 1881-1897 gives you the naturalist and the private coded diarist, and it explains where the discipline in the drawings came from.