Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) was an English author, illustrator and naturalist. She grew up in a well-off London household and was taught at home by governesses. For years she studied fungi and painted them in watercolour, and her paper on how their spores germinate went to the Linnean Society in 1897. It was read out by someone else, because women were not admitted to the meetings.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit began as a letter. She wrote it out with pictures in September 1893 for Noel Moore, the small son of her former governess, who was ill in bed. Publishers would not take the book, so in 1901 she had 250 copies printed at her own expense. Frederick Warne and Co. published it in colour in October 1902, and more small books followed, twenty-three in all.

With what the books earned she bought Hill Top, a farm at Near Sawrey in the Lake District, in 1905. She married the solicitor William Heelis in 1913 and farmed for the rest of her life, breeding Herdwick sheep and showing them. When she died she left about four thousand acres and fifteen farms to the National Trust.