|
|
|
Book Review
| Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature. By Linda Lear. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2007. xix + 584 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $30.00.
|
| Beatrix Potter's accomplishments went well beyond being the author and illustrator of the Tale of Peter Rabbit and other classic children's stories, to making significant scientific and environmental contributions. In particular, Potter was a leader in the effort to protect and preserve the landscape of England's Lake District. Her purchase of a Lake District farm in 1905 was the beginning of almost four decades of work as a farmer, sheep and cattle breeder, major landowner, and preservationist. Lear's meticulously researched book, based on a wealth of primary material, provides an accessible, straightforward, immensely detailed biography of this unusual woman. |
1
|
|
Beatrix Potter was born in 1866 to a wealthy and upwardly mobile London family originally from near the Lake District, in Lancashire and Manchester. Interested in the natural world from childhood, she possessed a wide and beloved assortment of pets, loved being out-of-doors, and early turned her considerable artistic talents to drawing and painting from nature. In her twenties she suffered from illness, from a puzzling social seclusion and lack of suitors (given her family's wealth and social aspirations), and from parental demands that she care for them. Though Potter never received any formal education other than in painting, she was a self-taught natural historian who acquired considerable scientific expertise about fungi, and became an accomplished scientific illustrator. She wanted to use her artistic skills to acquire independent income, and in 1901, at the age of 36, persuaded Frederick Warne & Co. to publish The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The book was an immediate success. The many books that followed, and Potter's skill at licensing merchandise based on her characters, brought her the income that let her establish her life in the Lake District. |
2
|
|
Lear sees Potter as "one of those rare individuals who is given a real third act" (p. ix), which began with her engagement, against her parents' wishes, to her publisher Norman Warne in 1905 at age 36. Tragically, Warne died suddenly of leukemia a month later. Shortly after, Beatrix Potter purchased Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey, a Lake District village she had come to love during summer holidays. Through managing the farm and buying additional land, she came to know the solicitor William Heelis. They married in 1913 despite parental opposition. From then on Potter's time was increasingly given over to her marriage, her management of her farms and other properties, the breeding of prize-winning Herdwick sheep and Galloway cattle, and preservation efforts. The writing, drawing and painting that had made this life possible received less of her time and attention, and she published only intermittently the rest of her life. She eventually became the largest landholder in the area, and by working with the National Trust (founded in part by Lake District preservationists in 1895) sought to protect both the landscape and way of life of the fell country. She died in 1943 and her husband in 1945, the Heelis' joint estate bequeathing seventeen farms comprising more than four thousand acres to the National Trust. |
3
|
|
Lear frames this book as "a life in nature," which gives the biography a thematic and interpretive focus. However, "nature" is never much more than a unifying backdrop for the details of Beatrix Potter's life. Lear does not utilize the methodology and approach of environmental history to set Potter's life into historical context, and there is a frustrating sense of connections and questions that could have been mentioned, even if not explored or discussed. That she loved nature is clear, but what nature meant to her is not. Furthermore, the book does not give the reader a sense of the Lake District fell country as a material and historical landscape. Nor does it connect the work of Potter and the National Trust to what was happening elsewhere in Britain and in the United States at the same time. However, Lear does do justice to Beatrix Potter's character and her work, offering a sympathetic but nonetheless honest portrait of this complicated and formidable woman. This book is an excellent biography of a person important to environmental history, though it is not in and of itself an environmental history. |
4
|
|
Ann Greene teaches environmental history at the University of Pennsylvania. Her book, Harnessing Power: Horses in the Industrial Era, is forthcoming from Harvard in 2008. |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|