2014 A to Z Challenge: P

Beatrix Potter

Wikipedia says,

Beatrix Potter (born Helen Beatrix Potter; 28 July 1866 – 22 December 1943) was an English author, illustrator, natural scientist and conservationist best known for her imaginative children’s books, featuring animals such as those in The Tale of Peter Rabbit, which celebrated the British landscape and country life.

Born into a wealthy Unitarian family, Potter, along with her younger brother Walter Bertram (1872–1918), grew up with few friends outside her large extended family. Her parents were artistic, interested in nature and enjoyed the countryside. As children, Beatrix and Bertram had numerous small animals as pets which they observed closely and drew endlessly. Summer holidays were spent away from London, in Scotland and in the English Lake District where Beatrix developed a love of the natural world which was the subject of her painting from an early age.

She was educated by private governesses until she was 18. Her study of languages, literature, science and history was broad and she was an eager student. Her artistic talents were recognized early. She enjoyed private art lessons, and developed her own style, favouring watercolour. Along with her drawings of her animals, real and imagined, she illustrated insects, fossils, archaeological artefacts, and fungi. In the 1890s her mycological illustrations and research into the reproduction of fungus spores generated interest from the scientific establishment. Following some success illustrating cards and booklets, Potter wrote and illustrated The Tale of Peter Rabbit, publishing it first privately in 1901, and a year later as a small, three-colour illustrated book with Frederick Warne & Co. She became unofficially engaged to her editor Norman Warne in 1905 despite the disapproval of her parents, but he died suddenly a month later of leukemia.

With the proceeds from the books and a legacy from an aunt, Potter bought Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey, a tiny village in the English Lake District near Windermere, in 1905. Over the following decades, she purchased additional farms to preserve the unique hill country landscape. In 1913, at the age of 47, she married William Heelis, a respected local solicitor from Hawkshead. Potter was also a prize-winning breeder of Herdwick sheep and a prosperous farmer keenly interested in land preservation. She continued to write, illustrate and design spin-off merchandise based on her children’s books for Warne until the duties of land management and her diminishing eyesight made it difficult to continue. Potter published over 23 books: the best known are those written between 1902 and 1922. She died of pneumonia/heart disease on 22 December 1943 at her home in Near Sawrey at age 77, leaving almost all her property to the National Trust. She is credited with preserving much of the land that now comprises the Lake District National Park.

Potter’s books continue to sell throughout the world, in many languages. Her stories have been retold in song, film, ballet and animation. The World of Peter Rabbit and Friends, a TV series based on her stories, has been released on VHS by Pickwick Video and later Carlton Video.

Marta Pelrine-Bacon

(who I have been following for a long time and whose debut novel, The Blue Jar, was released a few months ago.)

Amazon says,

Marta Pelrine-Bacon writes modern fairy tales and makes art from the printed pages of those tales.

Where Marta grew up – on a long stretch of road in central Florida – her father told her a witch lived in the abandoned house under a cluster of punk trees, and moss and hot air balloons carried Santa’s elves overhead. Their own house faced a lake big enough for an island in the middle where blackbirds settled for the sunset. For her, Florida was a perfect place to develop an interest in sharp objects and shadowy places. She says that is why she writes stories with odd twists, turns and edges.

She was born in the Sunshine State. Her maternal grandmother moved there in the 1920s. Her father moved there in 1959. That’s hardly any history at all. Except in Florida, that’s a lot! But she left home at 17 to study English and writing in Indiana, and she followed that with her Master’s Degree from Kent State University. To see something else of the world, she joined the Peace Corps and taught English in Bulgaria for two years. One way or another, she has always written and made art.

According to Marta, she writes because stories well up in her brain. She would go mad if she didn’t let them out. While her past inspires her stories, her stories are not her past, and she is not her characters. Characters come to her in images, and she writes to discover why they are doing what they do.

The Link

Both authors are also accomplished artists and have illustrated their own books.