Beatrix Potter is not only the author of some of the best loved children’s books of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries; she was also an accomplished botanist, naturalist, and writer, and an extremely talented watercolour painter, and Linda Lear’s biography highlights the less-well-known achievements of this extraordinary woman, showing how they influenced the stories so many children love and how they were the product a woman who overcame the strictures and privations of the Victorian middle-class woman with energy, intelligence, and steadfast confidence in herself.

Lear’s biography is an extremely enjoyable read, and much more absorbing than I expected it to be. Rather than adhering to strictly chronological fact, Lear frequently takes the reader back and forth through time and space, concentrating on the people and – especially – the places which shaped each nuance of Potter’s life and work. Combining Potter’s personal history with a more general context of late Victorian culture, and painstakingly compiling the evidence of journals, letters, photographs, newspapers, and so forth, Lear presents us with a life which is complete and multi-faceted. She does not hesitate to readdress some of the common assumptions and myths which have surrounded Potter’s life, and her approach to Potter as a woman is both sensitive and penetrating.

 This biography is a truly engaging study, and a must not only for those studying Beatrix Potter, but also for those with an interest in her works, who enjoy her writing and art, and even those interested more generally in Victorian attitudes towards nature, botanical/scientific painting and illustration, and the life of the Victorian upper-middle class woman. I  highly recommend this book.

2008-04-14