From the age of 14 to 30, she also kept a journal, written in code, to voice her frustration and fears for the future (the journal was eventually decrypted, two decades after Beatrix's death, by Potter collector and obsessive, Leslie Linder).īeatrix Potter was already 47 years old when, in 1913, she at last won her freedom from her family by marrying William Heelis, the solicitor who had assisted her with the purchase of her portfolio of Lake District farms. As the dutiful daughter of a wealthy family, born in 1866, Beatrix used her private world of drawing and painting as an escape from the suffocatingly formal and restrictive routine of her parents, an existence in which summer holidays in the Lake District provided the only outward respite. Secrecy, about herself and the life of her imagination, was always of utmost importance to Beatrix Potter. Sixty years ago, Margaret Lane's pioneering biography of Beatrix Potter was published, and the gap of silence about one of the world's most successful children's writers began to be filled. Between 19, he wrote, "Miss Potter must have passed through an emotional ordeal which changed the character of her genius", though Greene acknowledged that it would be "impertinent" to enquire into its precise nature.Īfter Beatrix Potter's death in 1943, Lane pursued the case for a biography with William Heelis, Potter's widower, and made progress after she discovered that Heelis responded best to the hectoring tone that he had become accustomed to from his wife. This pessimism reached its climax with The Tale of Mr Tod. With his tongue only slightly in cheek, he observed that her great comedies - Two Bad Mice, Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, Tom Kitten, Mrs Tiggy Winkle, and Mr Jeremy Fisher - had been followed by the darker tragedies, Jemima Puddle-Duck, Mr Tod, and Pigling Bland. Greene had read Beatrix Potter's books in childhood, and, like his contemporary Evelyn Waugh, believed that her style of "gentle detachment" had exerted a formative influence on the development of his own writing.īut Greene discerned something else in Potter's work. He came partly to praise her, not so much for her exquisite illustrations, which dovetail so perfectly with the simplicity of the storytelling, as for the truthful and unemotional power of Potter's narrative voice. In 1933, the novelist Graham Greene published an article about Beatrix Potter.
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