Beatrix Potter was born in 1866 and grew up living the conventionally sheltered life of a Victorian girl in a well-to-do household. Her only brother, Bertram, was six years younger, and when he was away at school, Beatrix Potter's constant companions were the pet animals she kept in the school room. She would watch them for hours, studying their behaviour and sketching them with great skill.
On the 4th September 1893, Beatrix Potter sent a 'picture letter' to Noel Moore - the sick son of her former governess - to cheer him up. "My dear Noel", Beatrix Potter wrote, "I don't know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter"?"
Eight years later, undeterred by numerous refusals from publishers, Beatrix Potter privately published an initial 250 copies of Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit™. It was an immediate success and Beatrix Potter had another 200 copies printed. By this point Frederick Warne was very interested in Beatrix Potter's work and agreed to publish her book commercially, with the provision that Beatrix Potter's illustrations appeared in colour, which Beatrix Potter duly undertook. A phenomenal 50,000 copies of the book had been sold by the end of 1903, and it has never been out of print since!
Beatrix Potter was bursting with ideas, and produced on average two books every year until 1910. The same year, Beatrix Potter bought her first property in the Lake District, Hill Top Farm in the village of Sawrey. After Norman Warne's death Beatrix Potter spent as much time as she could there.The farm and surrounding countryside began to appear in Beatrix Potter's stories, and some of her best-loved illustrations show Lakeland scenes that have remained unchanged to this day.
In 1913, at the age of forty-seven, Beatrix Potter married William Heelis, a local solicitor, and made Sawrey her permanent home. Writing and painting began to take second place to farming, sheep-breeding and buying stretches of the beautiful Lakeland countryside to ensure their conservation. For the last thirty years of her life, farming and the preservation of land were to become Beatrix Potter's main concerns, and when she died in 1943 she left over 4,000 acres of land and fifteen farms to the nation.
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