This was not a role that came naturally to Beatrix, who was adventurous, opinionated, even mischievous-the Peter Rabbit to her mother’s Mr.
Her mother, Helen, herself constrained by social circumstances, wanted a quiet, obedient daughter-one that, when she grew older, would stay home and look after her parents. While those two luminaries were adult men when they started their diaries-Boswell a 22-year-old city playboy, and Pepys an up-and-coming civil servant-Potter, as a young woman in a Victorian household, was writing from a different life stage and station. Potter began keeping her journal when she was about 14 years old, “apparently inspired by a united admiration of Boswell and Pepys,” as she later wrote to Clark. Its eventual publication transformed her reputation, from “brilliant children’s book author” to “writer for the ages.” If it weren’t for one tireless, dedicated fan, we might never have seen it at all. In it, she wrote her innermost thoughts-about art and literature, science and nature, politics and society, and her own hopes and frustrations. As far as we know, this is the only time she ever mentioned what may well be her masterwork: a private journal, written in secret code, that she kept for over fifteen years. “I used to write long-winded descriptions, hymns (!) and records of conversations in a kind of cipher shorthand.”įive weeks later, Potter died.
“When I was young I already had the itch to write, without having any material to write about,” she explained to Clark. Instead, she reminisced about a very different project-longer, bolder, and entirely secret. In the letter, though, she didn’t mention any of these. Seventy-seven years old, laid up in bed with pneumonia and heart disease, Potter was doubtlessly thinking back on her long and varied career: her hundreds of landscape watercolors, her respected mycology research, and her 24 children’s books, some of which, like The Tale of Peter Rabbit and The Tale of Two Bad Mice, were already considered classics. In November of 1943, Beatrix Potter wrote a letter to her beloved cousin, Caroline Clark.
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