Beatrix Potter came from a wealthy middle-class family and was educated by a governess at home; as an only daughter, she had no playmates for much of the time (a younger brother had more formal schooling), but she enjoyed various pets, writing and drawing.  Her parents evidently sought to be conventional in every respect and chiefly benefited their children by neglecting them.  Carpenter  says her journals reveal her to be very independent and determined from the beginning, contemptuous of Victorian convention, including both religious and class strictures (279).
     Every summer of her childhood  was spent in the Lake District, where Beatrix and her younger brother wandered at large collecting plants and other natural artifacts, making pets of smaller wild animals, and drawing everything - both were natural artists.
     As an adult, Potter showed little interest in socializing or marriage; instead, she frequented the Natural History Museum near her London home and worked at her art.  In 1896, an uncle tried to get some serious attention for her botanical drawings of mushrooms and her biological theories (she correctly described the symbiotic relationship of fungus and algae that creates lichens), but to no avail.  The botanical establishment of her day was not prepared to credit her accurate understanding of the nature of lichens and the propagation of mold spores.  Both ideas, now known to be true, were dismissed in part because they flew in the face of scientific orthodoxy and because of Potter's age (30) and gender (Golden, "Naturalist" 631).
     Tabbert explains the story of Peter Rabbit in relation to this rejection: "This is the story of a woman who was expected to [be?] like Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail, but who desired to be like Peter." (153)
    After establishing herself as an author-illustrator, many of Potter's naturalist studies reappeared in subsequent stories, and all of her illustrations are extremely accurate: "Potter insisted on accuracy because she wanted her book illustrations also to serve as nature lessons for children" (Golden, "Naturalist" 638).
    She first wrote the adventures of Peter Rabbit in a letter to the son of her former governess in 1893; this story was enlarged with additional drawings in 1901, when she tried unsuccessfully to find a publisher.  Six rejected it, so she had 250 copies privately printed; they sold, causing a publisher, Frederick Warne,  to pick it up in 1903.
    Potter initially required significant editing under the supervision of Norman Warne -- excisions to eliminate "irrelevant rhymes and intrusive narrative sections."  Warne advised her to reduce both the text and illustrations for The Tale of Peter Rabbit to a total of 32 pictures; this cut gave the story greater unity.  The publisher also insisted that all of the pictures be colored, although Potter had originally thought that the dominance of browns and greens would be "uninteresting" (Golden, "Retrieving" 29-30).
     Potter was economical in her use of pictures.  In revision, rather than redo an entire picture, she would work on the problematic details on separate sheets until she arrived at an acceptable image, which she would cut out and paste over the detail in the original picture.  This was particularly necessary with human figures, which she had difficulty drawing and frequently had to revise.  She also retained deleted pictures and text and often recycled them into subsequent books (Golden, "Retrieving" 31-33).
    Peter Rabbit was immediately successful, and she produced more than 20 additional books over the next 15 years.  Her books quickly brought Potter money, fame, and a certain amount of independence from her stifling family life.  Her first editor, Norman Warne, fell in love with her but her parents rejected him since he was not a gentleman but "in trade"; however, Beatrix became engaged anyway, thanks to her independence.  Before they could be married, though, Warne became ill with leukemia and died.
    Potter used her royalties to buy property in the Lake District and increasingly spent more time there, marrying a local lawyer (William Heelis) over her parents' objections in 1913.  After marriage, she turned to farming and reduced her writing; over her last 30 years, she published only four more books.  She continued to be active in farming and worked to preserve the natural and historical sites in the Lake District.
     Potter's work was notable for refusing to talk down to children, offering difficult words and adult-quality illustrations to stimulate young minds.  The pictures are particularly interesting in that they look at the world from the level of a small animal/child rather than adult humans.  Graham Greene says her most obvious characteristic is "a selective realism" in which the action is always described from the outside" by a truthful and unemotional observer.  In a similar vein, Carpenter notes her "deliberately flat, unemotional narrative voice" which helped to make her a formative influence for writers such as Greene and Evelyn Waugh, who read her in childhood (297).
    In Peter Hunt's Children's Literature: An Illustrated History, the traditional view of Potter's work, with the pictures given precedence over the text, is challenged; they note the quality of her writing as well as her illustration -- e.g., her use of understatement for humorous purposes and her "balanced, almost biblical rhythms."  Note too that she avoids sentimentality both in the understated text and the accuracy and humor of the pictures (186).  Gillian Avery also notes the absence of sentimentality, with Potter's interest in animals more scientific than most writers of animal stories (189).
     Avery suggests Potter's work has affinities to the social comedy of Jane Austen, with wry commentary on human foibles.  In her stories, we don't see "animals with human feelings [but rather]. . . human beings given animal shapes for the purpose of satirical comedy"; this approach, similar to that of Aesop's Fables, is easily overlooked because of the technical scientific accuracy of her illustrations (189-90).
 Carpenter connects her to other fable writers in using animals to comment on human character traits, without needing to provide social background and elements such as sexuality.  But he goes on to note that her stories really aren't "moral tales" as fables are, but rather "immoral tales" that "demonstrat[e] the rewards of nonconformity, and exhort. . . her young readers to question the social system into which they found themselves born" (279).
     The sense that Potter's works are subversive, encouraging resistance to social conditioning, recurs frequently in criticism.  For instance, Lurie says the book appears to admonish restraint and obedience, but in fact teaches that disobedience and exploration are more fun and not really that dangerous (95).

Sources:   Avery, Gillian, "Beatrix Potter and Social Comedy," Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 76, 3 (Autumn 1994) 185-200; Carpenter, Humphrey, "Excessively Impertinent Bunnies: The Subversive Element in Beatrix Potter," in Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs, Children and Their Books, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989; Golden, Catherine, "Beatrix Potter: Naturalist Artist," in Bill Katz, Ed., A History of Book Illustration: 29 Points of View, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1994, 626-41; Golden, Catherine, "Retrieving Beatrix Potter's Revision Process," in Judith Kennedy, Ed., Victorian Authors and Their Works: Revision Motivations and Modes, Athens: Ohio UP, 1991, 28-40;  Hunt, Peter, Ed.,  Children's Literature: An Illustrated History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995; Lurie, Alison, Don't Tell the Grown-Ups: Why Kids Love the Books They Do, New York: Avon, 1990; Tabbert, Reinbert, "National Myths in Three Classical Picture Books," in Maria Nikolajeva, Ed., Aspects and Issues in the History of Children's Literature, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995, 151-63.
 

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