From London to Hill Top

Beatrix Potter came to love the Lake District from holidays there as a child. When she accumulated sufficient assets from her writing to make herself independent she bought Hill Top Farm, Sawrey, in the hills between Coniston Water and Windermere, two of the largest of the English Lakes. She was deeply in love with the area, and was a great supporter of the conservation movement and the development of the National Trust. She bought up considerable areas of farmland to save it from being taken over by speculative developers, and eventually willed it to the National Trust.

The book illustrated here is the original 1962 Penguin edition of Margaret Lane's biography of Beatrix Potter. (Yes, I bought it new then, and apart from a little yellowing it has survived in almost as new condition). It was originally published in hardback in 1946, just three years after its subject's death, and was written with the cooperation of her family.

I can't help wondering, given the class-consciousness (indeed down-right snobbishness) of her nouveau riche family in her early years, whether the fact that her biographer was the wife of the Earl of Huntingdon had anything to do with the access provided for the writing. Maybe not; I don't know, but whatever the case the quality of this first Beatrix Potter biography is so outstanding that it is still in print and popular today. A revised edition was published in 1985 to take account of information that had come to light in the intervening years.

Click on the book image above to buy from Amazon.com, or
here to buy in the UK from Foyles of London.

I'm also putting information about Beatrix Potter on my "England's Lakes" web site.