I must confess, I hated Valentine’s Day until quite recently. Sure, I like chocolate as much as the next girl, but mostly the holiday made all my February birthday presents pink and red with hearts. Or just reminded me how single I was. But lately my tune has changed.
The past three Valentine’s Days have been wonderful, and not just because I’ve shared them with Andy. They’ve caused me to reflect on love and the people who helped me get where I am today—as a person and a writer. This particular season, I’ve been thinking back to my very first love who made me want to be a writer in the first place. Her name was Beatrix Potter.
A Magical World of Rabbits
Some of my earliest childhood memories are of my dad reading to me. I remember those first stories so clearly: The Secret Garden. The Chronicles of Narnia. The Berenstain Bears. A Little Princess. Peter and the Wolf. If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. My favorite stories were about animals, stories like The Mouse and the Motorcycle, Shiloh the dog, My Little Pony, and absolutely anything about cats. But one author captured my imagination more than all the rest.
Her stories featured rabbits primarily, but also mice, kittens, ducks, squirrels, and porcupines. All of them talked and wore charming clothes. They lived in an enchanted place called England, a land of forests and rolling hills where people drink afternoon tea and live in old houses with secret passageways. The stories of Peter Rabbit and Tom Kitten and Jemima Puddle-Duck enthralled me more than anything else ever had. Especially when I learned that their magical world was a real place.
Not only that, the person who wrote about them was the same person who painted their portraits.
The Paintbrush Behind the Woodlanders
The concept of a writer illustrating her own book was stunning to me as a little girl. I’d never seen anything like it. And all the animals she wrote about were so realistic and from the same place Beatrix was from, so they had to be real.
It didn’t take long for me to decide at the ripe age of six that I wanted to be just like Beatrix Potter, artwork, animal stories, and all. I was already a budding artist (as evidenced by the walls of our apartment), and even though animals didn’t wear blue jackets with brass buttons where I lived, I was sure I could imagine them just as well as Miss Potter.
My lifelong dream of being an author and an illustrator was born.
Falling Deeper in Love
I did figure out eventually that talking, well-dressed animals are fictional. But as I grew up painting and inventing stories of my own, somehow the magic of Beatrix Potter grew instead of diminishing. The more I read her stories, the more and more I recognized her talent.
It doesn’t take many art lessons to find out just how difficult watercolor really is. The medium frustrated me to no end as a young, control-freak art student. The way the paints flowed and lived a life of their own was both beautiful and maddening. Miss Potter had to be some kind of goddess to achieve such lovely technique in her drawings.
And as time went on, I realized more and more how her stories breathed new life into some of the oldest fairy tale archetypes. Talking animals have been around since the dawn of time, gracing the same landscapes as fairy tale princesses, rogues, and villains. But what really makes fairy tales magical is how they combine the real with the enchanted in such a bold, natural way.
I’ve always seen Beatrix Potter as the epitome of this concept. She drew the very animals that surrounded her in rural Windermere, injecting her British lifestyle into every page. But despite their realism, her stories are still genuine fairy tales.
Jemima’s encounter with the foxy gentleman is really just Little Red Riding Hood told anew. Tom Kitten’s rescue from two rats planning to bake him into a pudding is strikingly like Hansel and Gretel. Peter Rabbit longing to go to Mr. McGregor’s garden and leaving his jacket and shoes behind is absolutely a Cinderella story. The mystical mountain of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle the porcupine is perhaps the most supernatural element of Beatrix’s work.
But the Most Magical Thing Is Beatrix Potter’s Life
I didn’t know much about the actual life of Beatrix Potter until I was an adult. In fact I was in college when I first saw the film Miss Potter, which is one of my top three favorite movies ever, right up there with Ever After and It’s A Wonderful Life. I have a taste for sentimentality in case you can’t tell.
Watching Renée Zellweger portray Beatrix Potter was both wildly nostalgic for me and shockingly new all at once. I’ve felt a connection to Beatrix Potter my whole life as both a writer and a woman. But the way this film dove into her psyche was uncanny. Beatrix seeing stories everywhere, knowing her characters as real people, wanting to be seen as more than an unmarried woman—all of it was just like me.
Beyond that, I had no idea just how remarkable Beatrix Potter was. I didn’t know she was a renowned botanist, sheep breeder, and conservationist on top of her writing career. I hadn’t a clue that after Beatrix’s struggle to find a publisher, Frederick Warne & Co reprinted her first book six times its first year. Or that she fell in love with her editor, Norman Warne, a story that the movie told SO well it left me breathless.
I certainly had no idea that Beatrix used her wealth to preserve thousands of acres of the Lake District in northern England. Thanks to her, this land looks exactly the way it did a century ago when Beatrix Potter lived there.
And I was determined to see it one day.
Just a Few Years Later, I Did
It was 2013, and I was definitely going through a personal slump. I was right in the middle of writing my first book, figuring out who I was, and trying not judge myself too harshly for where my life was rather than where I wanted it to be. But the best thing that happened that year was visiting Windermere, England, for the first time in my life.
To put it lightly, it did not disappoint.
The views, the charm, the feeling of being transported centuries back to a slower, more genteel time period was all intoxicating. I visited the Beatrix Potter Gallery filled with her original paintings, ate at the pub that allegedly inspired Jemima Puddle-Duck, and saw Hill Top Farm. All of it was sublime.
That trip was exactly what I needed at that point in my life. Reconnecting with nature and walking in the same places Beatrix walked filled my soul in a way I hadn’t felt in a long time. It gave me the inner strength to keep going in the crazy journey of my own life, and for me, that was enough.
In the End, Beatrix Potter Really Was My First Love
I owe so much to this creator’s inspiring work and inspiring life. I’m not painting these days, though I do hope to revisit that hobby later in life. And my writing career? Well six finished books isn’t too shabby. I’m right in the process of finding a publisher of my own, a process that Beatrix herself undertook. And that thought satisfies me.
This month when love is on people’s minds, it felt right to reflect on Beatrix Potter. How she lit my passion for reading and stories. How she found magic in her own surroundings and inspires me to do the same. And certainly how grateful I am that her life has intersected with mine in a way I could never forget. ❧
