Drawing

1903–1922

Two or three books a year with the editor Norman Warne

“The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin” and “The Tailor of Gloucester” followed “Peter Rabbit” in 1903 — both also began as picture letters to the Moore children. Working with the editor Norman Warne, Beatrix published two or three little books a year — 23 in all in that format, the last, in 1922, being “Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes”; the royalties gave her a degree of independence, though she still lived with her parents.

1905–1913 · Education

governance

summer 1912

William Heelis proposes

By the summer of 1912 William Heelis, the solicitor with whom Beatrix handled the affairs of her farms, had proposed and she had accepted; she did not tell her parents at once, and they again disapproved, since Heelis was only a country solicitor.

15 October 1913

Marriage to William Heelis and the move to Near Sawrey

On 15 October 1913, at St Mary Abbots in Kensington, the 47-year-old Beatrix married William Heelis and moved with him straight to Near Sawrey, to Castle Cottage, the renovated farmhouse on Castle Farm. Hill Top remained a working farm but was remodelled to house the tenant family and her private studio and workshop.

c. 15.10.1913

Married: William Heelis

1914

Her father’s death, and her mother’s move to the Lake District

In 1914 Beatrix’s father, Rupert Potter, died; with the outbreak of the First World War she persuaded her widowed mother to move to the Lake District and rented her a house in Sawrey, from which she soon moved to Lindeth Howe in Bowness. Beatrix herself kept writing for Warne and threw herself into country life: she set up a nursing trust (for district nurses) for the surrounding villages and sat on committees dealing with footpaths and other rural matters.