In 1913, at the age of 47, she married William Heelis, a respected local solicitor from Hawkshead. Over the following decades, she purchased additional farms to preserve the unique hill country landscape. With the proceeds from the books and a legacy from an aunt, Potter bought Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey in 1905 a village in the Lake District, in the county of Cumbria (then Lancashire). Potter wrote thirty books, the best known being her twenty-three children's tales. Following this, Potter began writing and illustrating children's books full-time. In her thirties, Potter self-published the highly successful children's book The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Potter's study and watercolours of fungi led to her being widely respected in the field of mycology. She had numerous pets and spent holidays in Scotland and the Lake District, developing a love of landscape, flora and fauna, all of which she closely observed and painted. She is best known for her children's books featuring animals, such as The Tale of Peter Rabbit.īorn into an upper-middle-class household, Potter was educated by governesses and grew up isolated from other children.
According to Warne, more than 2m Potter books are sold every year.Helen Beatrix Potter ( / ˈ b iː ə t r ɪ k s/, 28 July 1866 – 22 December 1943) was an English writer, illustrator, natural scientist, and conservationist. Since then an industry has grown around her works, with everything from baby clothes to tea caddies available to buy. Potter left her rights to her publisher, Warne, when she died. But in Potter there is irony and wit, which isn’t translating.” Paddington Bear, by contrast, which has been adapted into two films, “is cuddly and funny in the books, so it works for him. She’s not a cuddly person, and the problem is when her characters are translated to the screen, the danger is they become cuddly.” “She’s not cutesy – bad behaviour gets punished, and she’s quite contemptuous of Jemima Puddleduck, who only wants a child. The problem with putting the creations on screen “is that they become cutesy, which is really quite un-Potter”, he said. “You take the books and translate them into abstract language, that is mostly visual … I think the ballet does work.” Peter Rabbit had already been made into a CBeebies series, which Joy said had “taken all sorts of liberties” in order to make it exciting and keep children watching.ĭennison said Potter would not have been keen on television or film, and suggested the only successful adaptation of her work was the ballet. The magazine called it “an object lesson in how not to adapt a beloved volume to the screen”, criticising Sony for “replacing the fable-like simplicity of her stories with a knowing veneer of contemporaneity”, and in so doing overlooking “the suggestive darkness at the core of Potter’s work”. Reviews have taken issue with what the New Yorker described as “violence and a puerile sense of humour”. Libby Joy, of the Beatrix Potter Society, agreed that the author would not have approved of something “so far removed from her original story”.Īlready accused of “allergy bullying” for a scene in which the rabbits attack Mr McGregor’s son with blackberries, knowing he will have an anaphylactic reaction, the Sony film is out in the US. Her line was that her rabbit was wearing a jacket, but he was anatomically correct, and aside from wearing a jacket, he behaved like a rabbit.”
“Toad combing his hair, she felt that was ridiculous. He said Potter felt Kenneth Graham did not get his animals right in The Wind in the Willows. “Peter Rabbit emerges as a bully, and there really isn’t any evidence for that in the story.” Every single detail she really thought about.”ĭennison said the film, in which James Corden is the voice of a CGI, twerking Peter, changes the essential character of its eponymous hero. And she was a bit beady – she was tough with her publishers on things like how much white space or text there was. There was nothing accidental or spontaneous about them. They came about through really close, careful work. “She was not exactly possessive, but she had a very clear idea in her head of how the books should be. “Very early on in her career, she decided to design dolls based on her characters, so that no one else could get it wrong …,” he said. Matthew Dennison, whose biography Over the Hills and Far Away was published in 2016, said Potter would not have approved of Sony’s take on a story that has been part of millions of children’s lives. “The idea of rooms covered with badly drawn rabbits is appalling,” she wrote. Potter, who died in 1943, oversaw an empire of products, from dolls to wallpaper, to circumvent attempts by others to create products based on her characters. Beatrix Potter at her farm Hill Top in the Lake District.