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 centuries, and used the proceeds to buy Hill Top Farm in 1905, then more farms after that, locking up the hill country piece by piece. At 47 she married William Heelis, a local solicitor, bred prize-winning Herdwick sheep, and kept working until her eyesight failed and the land required too much. She died of pneumonia and heart disease in 1943 at 77, leaving nearly everything to the National Trust - the lakes and fells she'd spent a fortune to save now permanent, a second creation that outlasted even Peter Rabbit.