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ABSTRACT
This article claims Beatrix Potter, author of the children’s classic The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), is a woman writer of and for rural modernity whose complex relations to rural and urban places, national and regional identities, fine and commercial arts, raise important questions about the gendering of green places, landscapes, and geographies in constructions of canonical modernism and children’s literature. Analysing research by biographers, rural historians, geographers, art historians, and critics of modernist and children’s literature, it argues that Potter’s acute measurement of the commercial possibilities that lay in the divide between rural real and rural ideal made her one of the most successful women writers of her generation and contributed to the early achievement of classic status of her twenty-three animal Tales (1902–1918). Enlisting close readings of Potter’s words and images in her Tales for an interdisciplinary feminist literary-geographical project, the article situates Beatrix Potter at the centre of studies of rural modernity and rural modernity at the centre of early twentieth-century women’s writing.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 There are Potter biographies popular with every generation. See for example Judy Taylor, Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller and Countrywoman (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1986); Susan Denyer, At Home with Beatrix Potter: The Creator of Peter Rabbit (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000); Emily Zach, The Art of Beatrix Potter: Sketches, Paintings and Illustrations (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2016); Matthew Dennison, Over the Hills and Far Away: The Life of Beatrix Potter (New York: Pegasus Books, 2017); and Sarah Gristwood, The Story of Beatrix Potter: Her Enchanting Work and Surprising Life (London: National Trust Books and HarperCollins Publishers, 2021). The critical biographies cited here include Margaret Lane, The Tale of Beatrix Potter (London: Frederick Warne & Co., [1946], 1972) and Linda Lear, Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007).
2 Lear, pp. 172–5, 227.
3 Lissa Paul, “Beatrix Potter and John Everett Millais: Reproductive Technologies and Coolhunting”, in Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit: A Children’s Classic at 100, ed. Margaret Mackey (Lanham, MD, and London: Children’s Literature Association and The Scarecrow Press, 2002), p. 61.
4 Ibid. Potter’s father, Rupert Potter, who occupied chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, lived as a gentleman of leisure and spent many hours photographing his daughter. See Lear, pp. 35–6.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid., pp. 58–9.
7 Joyce Irene Whalley, “Beatrix Potter’s Art”, in Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit: A Children’s Classic at 100, ed. by Margaret Mackey (Lanham, MD, and London: Children’s Literature Association and The Scarecrow Press, 2002), p. 48.
8 Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden appeared in 1911, the same year as E. Nesbit’s The Wonderful Garden or The Three C.’s. See Humphrey Carpenter, Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985).
9 Kristin Bluemel and Michael McCluskey, eds., Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), p. 2.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid. See for example Howard Newby, Country Life: A Social History of Rural England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987); Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw, eds., The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); Jeremy Burchardt, Paradise Lost: Rural Idyll and Social Change since 1800 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002); Alun Howkins, The Death of Rural England: A Social History of the Countryside since 1900 (London: Routledge, 2003); Trevor Wild, Village England: A Social History of the Countryside (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004); Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (1985; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); and David Matless, Landscape and Englishness, rev. 2nd ed. (1998; London: Reaktion Books, 2016).
12 See Raymond Williams’s classic The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Williams’s famous description of the moving escalator of pastoral ruralism is the most influential study to document contradictory cultural responses to an always “vanishing rural order”. For Williams, this escalator is a “clue to the real history” of rural England, its mystifications suggesting not “historical error” but questions of historical perspective or what he later calls “the degree of consciousness of real processes”. Country, 10, 34.
13 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1982, 1988).
14 Ibid., p. 11.
15 Ibid. More recently Matless has argued that “the rural needs always to be understood in terms relative to those of the city and the suburb, and approached as a heterogeneous field.” Landscape and Englishness, 35.
16 Bluemel and McCluskey, p. 2.
17 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). “Non-metropolitan everyday” is Rosemary Shirley’s term, popularised in her monograph Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), a recent effort to “reactivate[e] the rural as a site of modernity”. Shirley, Rural, 3.
18 Williams, Keywords, p. 81.
19 Matless anticipates scholars of rural modernity in his resistance to “a tendency to lump all cultural expressions of ruralism together as representing a simple, nostalgic and conservative longing for a ‘rural idyll’”. Landscape, 34–5.
20 Williams focuses on contrasts and interrelations between the country, “now an image of the past”, and the city, “an image of the future”, Country and City, 297, but it is Nan Fairbrother, writing before Williams, who best theorises the political-cultural stakes of the contest between images of differently developed areas of the countryside. See Fairbrother, New Lives, New Landscapes: Planning for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Knopf, 1970). See also Linda Ross, et al., New Lives, New Landscapes Revisited: Rural Modernity in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2023), for a contemporary reworking of Fairbrother’s project in terms of rural modernity.
21 There is a vast critical literature on women and late Victorian, Edwardian, and modern British literature. See for example foundational studies by Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, 1900–1940 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986); Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988–1996); and Bonnie Kime Scott, The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990).
22 Lear cites Potter’s many letters to friends and family recording her “ardent” embrace of married and country life. For example, called back to London three weeks after her marriage to sort out a servant crisis in her parents’ home, she moaned “I feel very dumpty without my husband” and in another letter complained that “Nobody [in London] remembers to call me Mrs. Heelis”. See Life, 260–5, 263.
23 Lear describes Potter’s purchase of Hill Top Farm as “a turning point: a courageous assertion of personal freedom and emotional independence […] Sawrey was, as she had known it would be, ‘as nearly perfect a little place as I ever lived in’”. Life, 7.
24 The National Trust’s web page on Beatrix Potter (https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/discover/history/people/beatrix-potter) records both fourteen and fifteen farms in the Potter bequest. The Beatrix Potter Society claims fifteen. See https://beatrixpottersociety.org.uk/beatrix-potter/the-farmer/.
25 Mary Sebag-Montefiore, Women Writers of Children’s Classics (Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers, 2008).
26 Ibid., p. 1.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., p. 18.
29 Ibid.
30 Katherine R. Chandler, “Thoroughly Post-Victorian, Pre-Modern Beatrix”, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 32.4 (2007): 287–307.
31 Ibid., 287–8.
32 Ibid., 288.
33 Ibid.
34 See Chandler, 297–8, for comparison of Potter’s “distinctly modern, economical use of prose” in Squirrel Nutkin (1903) and Benjamin Bunny (1904) and Hodgson Burnett’s “Victorian verbosity” in the opening paragraph of Chapter 2 of The Little Princess (1905).
35 Nathalie op de Beeck, Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
36 Ibid., p. viii. For important interventions in criticism about British children’s literature, modernism, and modernity, see for example Juliet Dusinberre, Alice to the Lighthouse: Children’s Books and Radical Experiments in Art, rev. ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999); Karin Westman, “Children’s Literature and Modernism: The Space Between”, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 32.4 (2007): 283–6; and Kimberley Reynolds, Left Out: The Forgotten Tradition of Radical Publishing for Children in Britain, 1910–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). British children’s book illustration authorities Joyce Irene Whalley and Tessa Rose Chester argue in A History of Children’s Book Illustration (London: John Murray and the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1988) that Potter revolutionised word-image relations in picture books for the very young. Daphne Kutzer’s lull-length critical study Beatrix Potter: Writing in Code (New York: Routledge, 2003) treats Potter as a modern writer. Critics Judith W. Page and Elise L. Smith analyse Potter’s little books in relation to modernist texts and contexts in Women, Literature, and the Arts of the Countryside in Early Twentieth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). Historian Matthew Kelly in “Beatrix Potter: A Farm of One’s Own”, in The Women Who Saved the English Countryside (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), pp. 77–149, regards Potter as a contradictory figure who helped create modern environmental consciousness by preserving landscapes from modernity.
37 op de Beeck, p. viii.
38 Ibid., p. x.
39 Ibid., p. ix.
40 Ibid., p. xv.
41 Ibid.
42 Quoted in Lane, Tale of Beatrix, 28. For treatments of modernist rural retreat, see Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Alexandra Harris Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames and Hudson, 2010); and Sam Wiseman, The Reimagining of Place in English Modernism (Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2015).
43 Beatrix Potter, The Journal of Beatrix Potter, 1881–1897, transcribed by Leslie Linder, rev. ed. (1966; London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1989).
44 Lane, p. 30.
45 See Matless for keen assessment of recent studies on pastoral forms and authenticating ambitions of twentieth-century literature and painting. He is suspicious of the category “rural idyll” because it “seems often to reproduce that ease and slackness which it purports to diagnose.” Landscape, 35. See also Elizabeth Outka, Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
46 In contrast to scholarship on modernist pastoral, see on the English rural tradition Glen Cavaliero, The Rural Tradition in the English Novel, 1900–1930 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977); W. J. Keith, The Rural Tradition: A Study of the Nonfiction Prose Writers of the English Countryside (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974) and Regions of the Imagination: The Development of British Rural Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); and Dominic Head, Modernity and the English Rural Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). See also Neal Alexander and James Moran, eds., Regional Modernisms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
47 Lane, pp. 30–1.
48 Leslie Linder’s transcription of Potter’s journal, The Journal of Beatrix Potter, and his History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter (London: Frederick Warne Co., 1971), along with Judy Taylor’s Beatrix Potter’s Letters: A Selection (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1989), have supported decades of biographical and scholarly study.
49 Quoted in Lane, Tale of Beatrix, 30.
50 Potter, Journal, 107–8.
51 Carpenter, p. 9.
52 Ibid., p. 13.
53 Ibid.
54 Peter Hunt, “The Same But Different: Conservatism and Revolution in Children’s Literature”, in Children’s Literature: Approaches and Territories, ed. Janet Maybin and Nicola J. Watson (London: Palgrave Macmillan and the Open University Press, 2009), pp. 70–84; 78.
55 Ibid., pp. 78.
56 Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1904).
57 Potter, Benjamin, p. 28.
58 Ibid., p. 29.
59 Hunt, p. 78.
60 Margaret Mackey, “Peter Rabbit: Potter’s Story”, in Children’s Literature: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. Heather Montgomery and Nicola J. Watson (London: Palgrave Macmillan and the Open University Press, 2009), pp. 87–95.
61 Ibid., p. 91.
62 Ibid.
63 See especially The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1903); The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1906); The Tale of Jemima Puddle Duck (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1908); and The Tale of Mr. Tod (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1912).
64 Hunt, p. 76–7.
65 Ibid., p. 77.
66 Beatrix Potter, The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, or, The Roly-Poly Pudding, (1908; London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1926) was first published as The Roly-Poly Pudding. I use the 1926 title throughout. Potter wrote about Hill Top’s rats to correspondents. See for example Taylor, Letters, 140, which quotes her 5 April 1906 letter to Millie Warne in which she comments that her new house “really is delightful if the rats could be stopped out!”
67 Potter, Whiskers, p. 33.
68 Ibid., p. 66.
69 Ibid., p. 25.
70 Compare by way of contrast The Tale of Jeremy Fisher (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1906), which luxuriates in lovely outdoor colours of garden, lily pond, and sky, including only one black and white line drawing on its title page.
71 Potter, Whiskers, p. 72.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid., p. 22, 74.
74 Ibid., p. 34.
75 Ibid., p. 80.
76 Potter, Peter Rabbit, p. 16.
77 Potter, Whiskers, p. 78.
78 Ibid., p. 77, 78, 77.
79 Ibid., p. 78, 80.
80 Ibid., p. 81.
81 Ibid., p. 20.
82 Ibid., pp. 81–2.
83 Kimberley Reynolds documents the sexist culture of English publishing through at least the 1970s in “Publishing Practices and the Practicalities of Publishing”, in Children’s Book Publishing in Britain, ed. Kimberley Reynolds and Nicholas Tucker (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1998), pp. 20–41. Elizabeth West, The Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children’s Literature: Only the Best (New York and Abingdon: Routledge, 2023), tells the happier tale of mid-twentieth-century bookwomen who institutionalised women writers’ contributions to British children’s literature. When Potter signed on with publisher Frederick Warne, his sons Harold, Fruing, and Norman were in charge, but they had acquired with the firm’s backlist and reputation its male-dominated Victorian institutional structures and values. Potter’s dealings with the Warne men and male institutions of Edwardian publishing proved good practice for her work in later years as a farmer, sheep breeder, and show committee member, as rural institutions were as devoted as urban to traditions of male leadership. Taylor’s biography, Beatrix Potter, 200, includes a telling photo of Beatrix and one other woman and 23 men of the Hawkshead Show Committee of 1922. It was not until March 1943 that Potter was elected president of the Herdwick Sheep-Breeders’ Association. In the words of her most recent biographer, Gristwood, Story, 136, “She would have been the first woman to hold the position – had she lived to occupy it”.
84 Jenny Bavidge, “Stories in Space: The Geographies of Children’s Literature”, Children’s Geographies, 4.3 (2006): 319–30; 324, 320.
85 Ibid., 324.
86 Ibid.
87 Ibid., 320.
88 Ibid.
89 Ibid., 328.
90 Ibid.
91 See Rosemary Shirley, Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2015); Bluemel and McCluskey, Rural Modernity; and Ross, et al., New Landscapes Revisited.
92 Wild, pp. xv–xvi.
93 Williams, Country and City, p. 129.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Kristin Bluemel
Kristin Bluemel is Professor of English and Wayne D. McMurray Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Monmouth University. Her publications on British modernism, intermodernism, women writers, World War II writers, and rural literature include the edited volumes Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (Edinburgh University Press, 2009) and Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention, co-edited with Michael McCluskey (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). Her book Enchanted Wood: Women Artists, Rural Britain, and the Twentieth-Century Wood Engraving Revival is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press.