#british-authors — Public Fediverse posts

Beatrix Potter

Everybody remembers Peter Rabbit. Personally, I always preferred the duck.

Jemima Puddle-Duck may have possessed all the survival instincts of a damp tea towel, but at least she had ambition. Peter nicked vegetables, lost his clothes and became an international merchandising empire. Jemima set off to find somewhere private to lay her eggs and nearly got herself eaten by a fox. Neither, however, was half as interesting as the woman who created them.

Beatrix Potter has suffered rather badly from her own success. mention her name and up pops the neat little Victorian lady surrounded by rabbits in blue jackets, hedgehogs in aprons and mice apparently capable of maintaining considerably better households than most of us. It’s all terribly quaint. It is also only a fraction of the story.

Helen Beatrix Potter was born in London in 1866 into a wealthy family. Like many girls of her class, she was educated mainly at home and spent much of her childhood away from other children. Her younger brother Bertram eventually went away to school, while Beatrix remained under the supervision of governesses.

What she did have was animals. Lots of animals.

The Potter household accumulated rabbits, mice, birds, bats, lizards, snakes, frogs and various other creatures, many of which Beatrix and Bertram drew and studied. Some were pets. Some were specimens. Victorian natural history wasn’t always particularly sentimental, and Beatrix’s interest in the natural world went much further than tying a ribbon around a bunny and giving it a name.

She was a very talented observer. During family holidays in Scotland and the Lake District she drew plants, animals, insects and fungi with extraordinary accuracy, and it was fungi that really caught her attention.

Yes, before Peter Rabbit, there were mushrooms. Hundreds of them. Beatrix spent around a decade collecting, studying and painting fungi. She eventually produced more than 350 fungal illustrations, many of them extraordinarily precise. She wasn’t just painting attractive toadstools, either. She became fascinated by how fungi reproduced, experimented with germinating spores and observed them under a microscope. By 1896, she was successfully growing spores from fungal species on glass plates and recording what happened. This was serious natural history. In 1897, under the name Helen B. Potter, she submitted a scientific paper called On the Germination of the Spores of the Agaricineae to the Linnean Society of London. And this is where we need to dispose of one particularly persistent piece of Beatrix Potter folklore.

You will often read that the Linnean Society refused to allow Beatrix to present her own paper because she was a woman. That is not quite what happened. Women couldn’t become fellows of the Society until 1905, so there was unquestionably a barrier between Potter and the male scientific establishment. But authors did not ordinarily read their own papers at Society meetings anyway. Beatrix’s paper was read by the mycologist George Massee on 1 April 1897 and discussed by those present.

It wasn’t rejected either. The Society’s records show that Potter withdrew it herself a week later. She subsequently wrote that Massee had told her it had been well received but required more work before publication. For whatever reason, she never completed those revisions and the paper disappeared. So Beatrix Potter was not the author of a revolutionary scientific paper thrown out by a roomful of horrified Victorian men. The real story is more complicated, and considerably more interesting.

There is another myth attached to her scientific career: that she discovered lichens are a partnership between fungi and algae. She didn’t. That theory had already been proposed by the Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener, and evidence from Potters own coded journal suggests that she actually favoured a different interpretation. A mistranslated footnote later helped turn her into the forgotten discoverer of something she hadn’t discovered at all.

But she doesn’t need embellishment anyway. Her real work was impressive enough. Her strength lay in extraordinarily careful observation. Some structures visible in her fungal paintings were not formally described by scientists until decades later. Her illustrations were accurate enough to be useful in identifying species, and substantial collections of her botanical work survive today. It seems odd looking at them now. We know Beatrix Potter so completely through fluffy animals in waistcoats that seeing page after page of meticulously observed fungi feels like discovering that Enid Blyton spent her weekends rebuilding motorbikes.

Then came the bloody rabbit.

Peter Rabbit first appeared in an illustrated letter written in September 1893 to five-year-old Noel Moore, the son of Potter’s former governess Annie Moore. Noel was ill, and Beatrix entertained him with the story of four little rabbits called Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter. Years later, encouraged to turn the story into a book, she offered it to publishers. They weren’t particularly interested, but Beatrix was. So she published it herself. In December 1901, she paid for 250 copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit to be printed. Another 250 followed in February 1902.

Then Frederick Warne & Co., which had previously passed on the book, reconsidered. The commercial edition appeared in October 1902 with an initial printing of 8000 copies. Another 12000 were printed the following month. Then another 8220 in December. Beatrix’s reaction to the whole ridiculous business was lovely:

“The public must be fond of rabbits!”

And indeed they were, because the bloody rabbit had gone beserk. Peter Rabbit became enormously successful, and Beatrix proved to have an extremely sharp understanding of what we would now call branding. She involved herself closely in the production of her books, scrutinising proofs, working on covers and title pages and even making suggestions about bindings. Then she went after merchandise.

In 1903 she created a Peter Rabbit doll and registered it’s design. Games and other products followed. This wasn’t an author sitting at home quietly while someone else exploited her characters. Beatrix Potter knew exactly what Peter was worth. Peter may have been stealing Mr McGregor’s lettuces, but Beatrix was building a business. More importantly, this business brought her independence. In 1905, using money earned through her books, she bought Hill Top, a farm at Near Sawrey in the Lake District. The same year should have been one of the happiest of her life, her editor, Norman Warne, proposed marriage in July. Beatrix accepted despite opposition from her parents. Only weeks later, Norman died from pernicious anaemia.

Hill Top became both a refuge and the beginning of an entirely new life. Beatrix continued writing, but increasingly found her attention drawn towards farming, land and the Lake District itself. She began buying property – and this is where the little old lady with the rabbits becomes seriously formidable. Beatrix became deeply involved with Herdwick sheep, the tough native breed associated with the Lakeland Fells. But she didn’t just acquire a picturesque flock to decorate the scenery. Beatrix learned about them, she bred them, she showed them, she won prizes. And she became sufficiently knowledgeable and respected to judge sheep herself.

Her standing within the farming community eventually became remarkable. She was elected president of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association – the first woman to ever receive that honour – although she died before she could take up the position. By this time, Beatrix Potter had become something very different from the image most of us inherited from the children’s books. She was a farmer, and she was buying farms for a reason.

Beatrix had become increasingly concerned for the future of the Lake District landscape. She understood that preserving it didn’t simply mean stopping somebody from putting an ugly building in front of a nice view. The traditional breeds, farming practices, people working the land and the farms themselves all mattered. She worked closely with the National Trust and had a long friendship with Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, one of it’s founders and an early supporter of her work. Rawnsley had even helped encourage Fredrick Warne to reconsider the little book about the troublesome rabbit.

As Beatrix’s wealth grew, she used it to acquire land. Lot’s of land. And when she died in December 1943, she left around 4000 acres to the National Trust, along with farms, cottages and flocks of Herdwick sheep. And you have to admit that is some magnificent achievement. A woman writes a story about a kleptomaniac rabbit, the rabbit makes her money, she uses the money to buy farms, then she leaves the farms to the nation. Peter Rabbit stole radishes. Beatrix Potter bought mountains.

It’s quite sad though, how the edges got sanded off her story. The illustrations are nothing less that beautiful, the stories are charming, the animals are unforgettable. But the woman behind all of that was considerably more complicated than the cosy image that survived her. She was an artist that took natural history seriously, a meticulous scientific illustrator and enthusiastic mycologist. She was a woman attempting scientific work in institutions where women still couldn’t participate on equal terms with men.

Beatrix was a writer who refused to leave a rejected book sitting in a drawer. She was a businesswoman who understood the possibilities of merchandising before merchandising was really a thing. A farmer who earned the respect of people who knew a lot more about sheep than children’ publishing. And a conservationist who used the fortune generated by her imagination to protect the landscape that she loved.

Even her apparent eccentricities make considerably more sense when you stop looking at her as the lady who drew rabbits and start looking at her as a Victorian naturalist. The animals, the specimens, the fungi, the microscopic observations, the endless drawings – they weren’t odd little sidelines to the children’s books, they came from the same place. Beatrix looked closely at things. She noticed how animals moved, how fungi grew, how landscapes worked and how quickly those landscapes could disappear. The she drew them, wrote about them, bought them or, occasionally, put them in tiny jackets.

And she also gave us Jemima Puddle-Duck, who remains proof that you can have absolutely no common sense whatsoever and still become an literary icon. She is an inspiration to us all.

Peter Rabbit can keep his stolen lettuces. I’ll take the duck.

And Beatrix can keep the Lake District

And another thing, my favourite definition of deus ex machina is:

"An improbable device for ending things."

Which I believe I gleaned from a Len Deighton book of short stories. An underrated author, I reckon, and a darn sight more interesting than Ian Fleming, IMHO.

#latintag #quotes #fiction #spyfiction #britishauthors

#MurderEveryMonday Crime fiction title with an evaluative adjective

When Kate reminded us of this week’s #MurderEveryMonday theme, my first thought was for H. R. F. Keating because I had noticed a pattern in some of his books:

• The Bad Detective
• The Good Detective
• The Soft Detective
• The Rich Detective

These are standalone’s and I never read anything by Keating, but I’m curious about his writing. He was president of the Detection Club between 1985 and 2000. I do have two related books in my immediate TBR: Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime, essays edited by him, and The Verdict of Us All – edited by Peter Lovesey, a collection of short stories by The Detection Club’s members in honour of Keating’s 80th birthday, which include before each work a memory or contact these writers had of H.R.F. Keating.

It’s Friday, let’s read: Gardening for women and Frances Wolseley

(Edited 03/08/2025: Monica was so kind to search online for the book The Countryman’s Log Book and shared the link in the comments. Thank you so much! I’m adding the link also in the post)

This week, the British Library shared a link to the online exhibition “Frances Wolseley: Gardener, activist, aristocrat” at LibraryOn, that shows the importance Wolseley had in promoting gardening as a profession for women. The exhibition is based on the special collections found in the libraries and it’s really interesting. You check it here.

Wolseley also wrote several books, now in public domain, so I thought that for the weekend I could share the links to Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive where you can download them and read them in whatever device you have (yes, even in a browser).

Gardening for Women – 1908 – a practical guide for women who wanted to follow gardening as a profession

In a College Garden – 1916 – About running a college for women gardeners

Women and the Land – 1916 – About the need to grow food during and after wartime

Gardens: their form and design – 1919 – Garden design (with beautiful illustrations, I think I’ll start with this one)

The Countryman’s Log Book – 1921 – About farming and old English traditions (It seems really interesting and is divided into months. Thank you to Monica that shared the link in the comments down below!)

She also published two more books that collected her articles published in a magazine (Some of the Smaller Manor Houses of Sussex and Historic Houses of East Sussex and their Owners). It’s not easy to find her books in paper either.

I hope you have a great weekend and happy reading!

#20thCentury #books #BritishAuthors #ebooks #Farming #FrancesWolseley #Garden #GardenDesign #Gardening #Nature #OldBooks #publicDomain #readings #Women

Tolkien lived in Africa as a child and yet he wrote the epic fantasy Lord of the Rings where all dark skinned peoples are on the side of evil.

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#movie #whitewriters #whiteauthors #fantasymovie #fantasy #britishwriters #britishauthors #blackbritish #blackmastodon