From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   Overlooked No More: Beatrix Potter, Author of ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit’   
   By Jess Bidgood, Jan. 19, 2024, New York Times   
   [This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable   
   people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.]   
      
   With “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” Beatrix Potter created what would become   
   one of the world’s best-known children’s book characters.   
      
   The book, about a cheeky rabbit who steals vegetables from the garden of one   
   Mr. McGregor and loses his coat and shoes in a narrow escape, became a   
   literary juggernaut that has sold more than 45 million copies. It also spawned   
   a merchandising empire and    
   has left an indelible imprint on children’s book publishing.   
      
   But Potter’s manuscript was initially dismissed by publishers.   
      
   The year was 1900, and Potter, then in her mid-30s, had submitted her book,   
   complete with her own intricate illustrations, to at least six publishers,   
   according to her biographer Linda Lear.   
      
   As the rejections flowed in, she unloaded her frustrations in a letter to a   
   family friend, including a sketch depicting herself, little book in hand,   
   arguing with a man in a long coat. “I wonder if that book will ever be   
   printed,” she fumed.   
      
   She finally decided to print it herself. The next September, she took her   
   savings to a private printer in London and ordered 250 copies of the book,   
   which she distributed herself. The demand was so great that she soon needed to   
   print 200 more. One early    
   admirer, she wrote in a letter, was Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the   
   Sherlock Holmes mysteries.   
      
   Finally, in 1902, Frederick Warne & Co., a London publishing house that was   
   among those that had initially rejected the manuscript, released “Peter   
   Rabbit” to a wider audience.   
      
   As the books flew off shelves (or hopped off, as the case may be), Potter   
   sensed a merchandising opportunity. She designed a Peter Rabbit doll,   
   injecting the legs with lead to help it stand up, and registered it as patent   
   No. 423888.   
      
   Soon there were china figurines, wallpaper and more dolls — products she   
   jokingly called “sideshows” even as she involved herself in their design,   
   copyright and quality control.   
      
   “If it were done at all, it ought to be done by me,” she wrote to her   
   editor, Norman Warne, after a reader approached her with another wallpaper   
   design in 1904.   
      
   “The idea of rooms covered with badly drawn rabbits,” Potter added, “is   
   appalling.”   
      
   Potter died of heart ailments and complications of bronchitis on Dec. 22,   
   1943, during World War II. She was 77. Though the death was not initially   
   reported by The New York Times, for reasons lost to history, the newspaper   
   referred to it in subsequent    
   weeks and months, noting that she left behind an estate worth $845,544 (about   
   $15 million in today’s dollars) and that Queen Elizabeth, the queen mother,   
   had bought all 15 copies of “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” from a London   
   bookstore to keep at    
   Buckingham Palace.   
      
   In her lifetime, Potter went on to write 22 more books, whimsical but   
   razor-sharp stories about soon-to-become enduring characters like Jemima   
   Puddle-Duck and Benjamin Bunny. Her characters, dressed in waistcoats and   
   bonnets, were rendered with    
   meticulous attention to anatomical detail, an outgrowth of Potter’s long   
   interest in natural science.   
      
   Her deep involvement with the business side of book writing — dealing with   
   licensing, for example — was unusual at a time when unmarried women’s   
   economic and social standing were limited.   
      
   “It is just historically remarkable that we have this female author, a   
   children’s author in particular, who had such control over her work,”   
   Chloe Flower, an assistant professor of English literature at Bryn Mawr   
   College, said in an interview.   
      
   It also gave Potter a pathway out of the overbearing home life that confined   
   most women in her day.   
      
   Helen Beatrix Potter was born on July 28, 1866, in London to Rupert and Helen   
   (Leech) Potter. Her father was a barrister, her mother a daughter of a   
   successful merchant. (Potter’s paternal grandfather had been a wealthy   
   calico trader and a member of    
   Parliament.) Beatrix’s upbringing was a whirlwind of country houses and   
   idyllic vacations — but it was stifling, too, hemmed in by a narrow set of   
   expectations for women, a tense relationship with her mother and a paucity of   
   friends.   
      
   Nature gave her an escape and a sense of purpose. She and her younger brother,   
   Bertram, collected insects and frogs, caught and tamed mice and trapped   
   rabbits to observe them. She drew them — and just about everything else —   
   endlessly, binding her    
   sketchbooks with string at first, according to her biographer Lear, who wrote   
   “Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature” (2006).   
      
   Bertram was sent to school, but Beatrix was not; she was taught by   
   governesses, took art lessons and made regular trips to the Natural History   
   Museum in London to find specimens to draw. In the mid-1890s, she sold   
   drawings of frogs and other work to a    
   fine arts publisher.   
      
   “One must make out some way,” she wrote in her journal in 1895. “It is   
   something to have a little money to spend on books and to look forward to   
   being independent, though forlorn.”   
      
   She took a particular interest in mycology, the study of fungi, which she   
   would examine under a microscope, and, despite her amateur status, sought out   
   the experts at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in London.   
      
   With encouragement from her uncle, a prominent chemist, Potter had a paper of   
   hers submitted to the Linnean Society, an organization devoted to natural   
   history, but it went unnoticed (a slight that the society apologized for after   
   her death). By the turn    
   of the century, Potter found herself over 30 and in need of something else to   
   do.   
      
   Seven years earlier, she had written what she called “picture letters” to   
   the children of a former governess — illustrated fictional tales about   
   creatures in the garden.   
      
   “I don’t know what to write to you,” read one from 1893, “so I shall   
   tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy,   
   Cotton-tail and Peter.”   
      
   It was the governess, Annie Moore, who suggested that Potter turn the letters   
   into books and sell them.   
      
      
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