Beatrix Potter

Helen Beatrix Potter grew up in an upper-middle-class Victorian household, educated by governesses, isolated from other children, filling the silence with pets and close observation of the natural world during holidays in Scotland and the Lake District. Her watercolours of fungi earned respect in mycology circles before she turned, in her thirties, to self-publishing The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902 — the book that made her, and the rabbit that became the first patented stuffed toy a year later. She wrote over sixty books, twenty-three of them the children's tales that would sell across centur…