Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter was born on 28 July 1866 in West Brompton, London, into an upper-middle-class Unitarian family. Taught at home by governesses, she and her younger brother Bertram kept mice, rabbits, a hedgehog and bats in the schoolroom, which they watched and drew. Holidays in Scotland and the Lake District fed her love of landscape and wildlife.

She became a skilled scientific illustrator, especially of fungi, and in 1897 her paper on fungus spores went to the Linnean Society, though as a woman she could not read it there herself. She also sent picture letters to the children of her former governess, and in 1893 told one of them a story about 'four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter'.

Frederick Warne & Co published The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902, and it was an immediate success. The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and The Tailor of Gloucester followed the next year, and two or three little books followed each year. This site's collection, The Tales of Beatrix Potter, includes The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck and The Tale of Tom Kitten, which reflect her life at Hill Top Farm in the Lake District. Readers loved her lively pictures and stories that did not preach.

In 1913 she married William Heelis, a local solicitor, and turned increasingly to farming and to buying farms to preserve the landscape. She died on 22 December 1943, leaving almost all her property to the National Trust and helping to preserve land now in the Lake District National Park.

Sources: wikipedia.org