Watercolour

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 · 求学

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.