Potter was quick to reject the amateur psychoanalysis of Graham Greene; her children’s books were, she claimed, simple and straight from the heart. Of course, Greene got it all wrong, except for the big thing; nothing as perfectly simple as ‘Peter Rabbit’ or ‘The Tale of Two Bad Mice’ comes straight from anywhere. The triumph of Linda Lear’s thorough, well-documented life of the children’s author and illustrator, and pioneer conservationist, is this: after reading it, one feels, finally, entitled to theorise on the basis of most of the possible information.
Potter had a privileged Victorian childhood that was at once an opportunity and a cage; her urbane, civilised parents encouraged her interest in art and biology, but as hobbies, not as a career. Not that she would have much of one in a world where science was almost entirely off-limits to women: Potter did some original research on lichens that was utterly correct in its conclusions and entirely rejected and neglected by the Linnaean Society when she presented it. Women were not even worth stealing from.
This rejection – Potter was a fine observer and her illustrative talents were still important in an era before accurate colour photography – was the wound, if any, that made her a great artist. The doomed engagement to a publisher of whom her parents disapproved followed on from that work – he was the publisher of the early books before they fell in love; his premature death gave her the strength to withdraw from London and daughterly duty to live on a hill farm where she wrote her later books and married, happily, a country solicitor.
The paradox is, then, that rejection as a scientist made her one of the artists who turned the children’s picture book into part of the canon of High Art; it does not take much ingenuity to see that the strength of most of those books comes from imaginative sympathy with theft and other transgressions. Male biologists taught her, very clearly, what it is to trespass on someone else’s cabbage patch.
