The Cottage Tales Backstory 2: The Several Lives of Beatrix Potter

BookScapes 9

In my previous BookScapes post, I mentioned that I wanted to say more about the research resources I used for my work on the Cottage Tale mysteries. (The books are likely available from your library in print and on Overdrive/Libby in ebook and audio.) So here we go.

The idea of using Beatrix Potter as a character first came up when Bill and I started working on our Robin Paige series. When I was learning to read, Beatrix’s children’s stories (The Tale of Peter Rabbit and more) were among my own very first books, so she had been special to me for a long time. She appears in our second book in the series, Death at Gallows Green, set in 1893. In this mystery, she tells Kate Ardleigh (our female sleuth) that her life is “suffocating.”

I am entirely dependent on my parents’ financial support. I am expected to live with them in Bolton Gardens until I am married. And that becomes less likely each year. They discourage friendships, you see, with men and with women. Not that I mind so dreadfully being a spinster. I have not yet met a man I wanted to marry, and I am perfectly content to live singly. But it is difficult, since I am allowed away from Bolton Gardens only in my parents’ company.

Twenty-seven at the time of Gallows Green, Beatrix is still under the stern control of her wealthy and domineering parents and increasingly aware of her social isolation. “I wonder why I never seem to know people,” she wrote sadly in her journal—in her secret code, finally decoded by Leslie Linder. “It makes one wonder whether one is presentable.” (More about that journal in a moment.)

Potter had also written and illustrated several stories but her father wouldn’t let her publish them. “I have begged to be allowed to submit them,” our fictional Beatrix tells Kate in words borrowed from her journal. “But unhappily for me my father is actively opposed, and my mother agrees to everything he says.” By the end of Gallows Green, however, Beatrix is able to declare some independence from her parents’ wishes, determining to publish a story she has written about Peter Rabbit.

Beatrix at 19, with her mouse, Xarifa

In fact, Potter’s real life was about to become a stair-step series of hard-won emancipations. In 1901, against her father’s wishes, she used her own money to self-publish The Tale of Peter Rabbit. In 1902, Frederick Warne & Co. offered to republish it and when the first and subsequent printings sold out, asked for more books. Over the next three years, Warne published six more of her books, all best-sellers. In 1905, at 39, she became engaged to her publisher—over her parents’ vehement objections. But Norman died tragically, shortly after their engagement, and she had to find ways to deal with his loss.

And that’s where my Cottage Tales series begins. The eight mysteries in the series trace the arc of Beatrix’s real life over the next eight years. The first book brings her to Hill Top Farm, in the village of Near Sawrey. “It is as nearly perfect a little place as I ever lived in,” Potter wrote to a friend, “and such nice old-fashioned people.” Each book focuses on a particular achievement or dilemma of that year, showing how the fictional Beatrix negotiates these very real challenges, gradually gaining enough confidence to feel that she can take command of her destiny. In the final book, at the age of 47 and again over her parents’ vehement wishes, she marries William Heelis, a local solicitor, and moves permanently to the village.

As Mrs. Heelis, Potter coped with the challenges of farm and field through two world wars. She became a passionate breeder and conservator of Herdwick sheep (the local native sheep), and an equally passionate patron of the new National Trust, purchasing farms that might otherwise have been sold off to real estate developers. At her death in 1943, she left the Trust fourteen farms and 4,000 acres of rugged hills and emerald valleys. The Lake District you can visit today is the enduring legacy of this remarkable woman.

Mrs. Heelis at 70

When I started doing the research for this series around 1999, the most available biographies were Margaret Lane’s two books (The Tale of Beatrix Potter: a Biography, 1946 and The Magic Years of Beatrix Potter, 1978) and Judy Taylor’s Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller, and Countrywoman (1987). These gave me the general outline of Potter’s artistic life and her years in the Lake District. I also had the journals and newsletters of the Beatrix Potter Society, through which (lucky for me!) I met Linda Lear, whose stunning biography of Rachel Carson I had already read and admired. Linda had just embarked on the award-winning biography she would publish in 2007, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature and generously shared her research on Potter’s conservation efforts. Her expert and intensive work influenced and enriched the Cottage Tales almost from the beginning. It especially helped me to understand what motivated Potter to invest her care and her resources in the land, its people, and its natural life.

Also important was The Journal of Beatrix Potter from 1881-1897, decoded by Leslie Linder and published in 1966 after 13 years of challenging work. Potter began the journal around the age of 14 and kept it until she was 31. Her code wasn’t complicated  (a “mono-alphabetic substitution cipher” in which each letter of the alphabet is replaced by a symbol). Linder’s challenge was to deal with her graphic fluency and her miniscule handwriting. She wrote so fast and confidently—in code!—that each page looks like a mass of scribbles.

Lines from Potter’s journal

Potter’s journal is the key—the secret key, literally—to the hidden life of this young Victorian woman and to her growing longing for the freedom to live it her way. Reading the journal, I knew I wanted to write about her self-emancipation from what amounted to a slavish attention to those Victorian parents of hers, who used every trick in the book to keep their only daughter firmly and permanently in their service. In that sense, the Cottage Tales (and Gallows Green, as well) are precursors of the biographical fiction series, Hidden Women, I began in 2012.

But biographical fiction wasn’t yet a Thing, and my best access to publication was via my publishing house, where I was a mystery writer. So I wrote my “biographical fiction” of Potter’s first eight years in Lakeland as a series of pastoral mysteries, each fiction woven around a particular event in a particular year (1905-1913) of Beatrix’s real life. I wanted to show the London artist settling into the daily life of a farmer in a rural English village, at home with the villagers, her animals, and the landscapes of the Lakes. With each book, Beatrix separates herself a little more from her dictatorial parents. There is a mystery (usually more than one), but the violence is muted—no noir, no blood.

I was happy to see that readers appreciated my intentions. These are “gentle mysteries,” one reviewer wrote, “captivating, whimsical, delightful.” And Booklist called the first book a “perfectly charming” cozy, “as full of English country loam, leaf, and lamb as could be desired.” (I smiled at the surfeit of alliterative ls, but understood what the reviewer was getting at.)

But my real intentions are likely to come through only for readers of the whole series, and especially for people who read the books in order. This is a huge demand to impose on readers, I know, and I’m very grateful to those of you who have been moved to make that commitment. If you’re one of this smallish band of stalwart readers, thank you! I hope you are able to see how the fictional Beatrix grew as a woman over the eight years between her purchase of Hill Top Farm and her marriage to Willie Heelis.

And perhaps you could also see how deeply I admire the real woman, the artist and writer whose magical imagination fired her wonderful children’s stories—and ignited my own.

I have more to say about the writing of the Cottage Tales, so I’m saving the May BookScapes post for some thoughts on using animal characters in adult fiction—animals who talk.