In November, 2005, Susan spoke on a panel at the Beatrix Potter International Studies Conference, at the Eric Carle Picture Book Museum in Amherst, MA. Others on the panel were Judy Taylor, author of Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller and Countrywoman (1989), and Linda Lear, author of Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature. Here is the text of Susan's talk.
Telling Her Life
Susan Wittig Albert
For the past two decades, I have been a writer of fiction, working primarily in the genre of "mystery." When I began this work, around 1985, I wrote primarily for young people. In 1990, I began writing for adults. In 1992, my husband Bill (my co-author for many of the young adult novels) and I began writing a series of historical mysteries set in late-Victorian and Edwardian England. Each of these books features a real person, whose real life is the context within which the story takes place.
The second book in our series, written in 1994 and titled Death at Gallows Green, featured Beatrix Potter1. I chose Beatrix as a character not only because I remembered her little books with fond delight, but because she was an occasional visitor at her cousins' home in Long Melford, not far from the setting of our novel, which is set in 1896. When I began foraging for materials about her life, I found a great deal of very good work ready at hand. I read Judy Taylor's biography and her collection of Beatrix's letters, and studied Leslie Linder's transcription of the journals and Margaret Lane's biography. I also joined the Beatrix Potter Society so that I could have access to its many publications. All of this gave me exactly what I needed: a broad and deep look into Beatrix's life up to the mid-1890s. Upon this base of fact and specificity, Bill and I were able to construct an interesting, believable fiction.
Gallows Green was published in 1996, and Bill and I moved on to other writing projects. But Beatrix had seized my imagination, and she wasn't ready to let me go. I wanted—I needed—to learn more about her. I began a serious study of her books, her life, her journal, her letters, and began to think about the possibility of creating not just one, but a series of fictions about her life. I discussed the possibility with my editor at Berkley Books, who encouraged me to go forward, and I began to think seriously of what this would involve.
First, I had to decide whether the series would be open-ended, like the other work I was doing, or whether it should focus on a particular period of Beatrix's life. Given my other writing commitments, I opted to create a limited series. But what should it be? Should I set these books while she was growing up at Number 2 Bolton Gardens? Or during the time in which she began to discover her talent for creating publishable work—say, from her Peter Rabbit letter of 1893 to the Frederick Warne publication of Peter, in 1902? Or perhaps I should write about the "Norman" years, 1902-1905, the early flowering of her fictional art and her feelings of love and friendship for Norman Warne, her editor and friend.
I decided against all of those options and chose, instead, to focus on the years between 1905, when Beatrix was 39 years old, and 1913, when she was 47. These eight years were a time of enormous personal crisis and growth for Beatrix, during which it is fair to say that she completely redefined herself. In August, 1905, as you know, Norman Warne died suddenly, just a month after his proposal of marriage. His death closed one chapter of her life and opened another. While she continued to live with her parents in London—ever the dutiful daughter—she bought Hill Top Farm in the Lake District village of Near Sawrey, the purchase of which she completed only a few months after Norman's death. While she continued to write and draw the Little Books, she broadened her subjects to include the animals of the farm, the village, and the Lake District meadows and fells. And while she continued to cherish her memories of Norman, she found room in her heart for a new love: Willie Heelis. What began in 1905 as an era of lost hopes and narrowed potential, became by 1913 an era of gain, of widening horizons, of new possibilities glimpsed and seized. It was perhaps the most dramatic period of Beatrix Potter's long and eventful life.
As a novelist, I was fascinated by what seemed to be the emergence—at midlife, when most women of her time were settled in their life's roles—of this new and far more independent person. I would set the first book at the farm in October, 1905, only a few short weeks after Norman's death. I would set the last book in 1913, as she and Willie have cleared the hurdle of the Potters' parental disapproval and are about to be married. Beatrix would begin the series at 39, as Miss Potter, and end it at 47, as Mrs. Heelis. The series "plot," if you imagine all eight books as one long novel, beginning with Book One and ending with Book Eight, would encompass this movement, this change, from the still-young and unsure Miss Potter to the mature and confident Mrs. Heelis. The plots of individual books would involve some of the real events that are documented in her letters: purchasing Hill Top Farm and renovating the house, for instance, or adding sheep and pigs to her farmyard menagerie,2 or writing The Roly-Poly Pudding and The Tale of Jemima Puddleduck.3 The plots would also include real events in the life of the countryside, like the threat of the flying-boat factory on Lake Windermere in 1911,4 the struggle to preserve the footpaths, and the continuing battle against the encroachments of real estate development.
I also had to decide how to handle the characters and settings of these fact-based fictions. Of course, Beatrix—the heart of the story—would be as true to life as I could make her, using the biographical tools that were available to me. But what of the other characters? What about the villagers? The Cannons, who lived at Hill Top, the Satterthwaites, where she sometimes roomed? What of the houses in the village, the lay of the land around it? How "true to life" should I try to be?
After a great deal of thought, I made a rule for myself. With regard to characters, I would try to recreate by name, physical description, and life facts only the real people who were at the center of Beatrix's life—Mr. and Mrs. Potter, Bertram Potter, Millie Warne, and Willie Heelis—and perhaps a few other real people whose presence might lend historical authenticity: Hardwicke Rawnsley, for instance, or the Armitt sisters. I would fictionalize everyone else, and thereby give myself the freedom to develop the characters I needed to create a particular story.
As for the settings, I made the same sort of general rule. Hill Top Farm would be just what it was for Beatrix during this time, as nearly as possible. The buildings of Near Sawrey (which are laid out and described in the Society's very useful map5) would be as they were, also, with no additions or deletions. In Far Sawrey, I would retain the main features—the Sawrey Hotel, the school, St. Peter's Church, the vicarage—and farther east, the ferry landing and the ferry itself. But I would give myself permission to add buildings (such as Tidmarsh Manor, Holly How Cottage, Raven Hall), and even a small lake or a large hill. However, I had to locate these imaginary features within the context of the Ordnance Survey Map of 1890, which shows the lay of the land as it was when Beatrix bought Hill Top.
And now I have come, inevitably, to the animals. When I first proposed the series to my editor, I didn't imagine that it would include—as it does now—animals as characters. As it happens, when Beatrix came to take possession of her new farm, in October, 1905, she brought with her Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, Josey and Mopsy Bunny, and Tom Thumb the mouse. I had written several chapters of the first book, and came to a scene in which Beatrix, surrounded by her animals, is asleep in her rented room at the Satterthwaites, where she stayed during that first visit.
Normally, I'm a disciplined writer who controls her material, but in this case, the material took control. To my surprise, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle began to talk about herself, and about The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, and about Miss Potter, and the other animals all chimed in.6 I immediately realized the value of these characters to the story, and to the whole series, and began to incorporate them, not as mere "colorful" characters, but characters who are instrumental to the plot, and who may even have plots of their own. And I used this franchise to create other animal characters—animals that live at the farm, in the village, and in the countryside. Galileo Newton Owl and Bosworth Badger XVII are two of my favorites.
In this imaginative effort, of course, I am following the model Beatrix herself followed: stories featuring animals whose interesting adventures usually point up some sort of important moral lesson, a kind of Aesop's fable. I am also following models of contemporary mystery writers such as Lillian Jackson Braun, Rita Mae Brown, and Carole Nelson Douglas, all of whom have introduced animals into their mystery fiction. (Of course, I had to get permission from Frederick Warne & Co., the owners of Beatrix's copyrights, in order to incorporate Beatrix's creations into my fiction.)
Bringing the animals into the books also broadened the audience, for with a little extra work, I could make the series suitable for a middle-grade and young adult audience, as well as adult readers. These would be books that could be read and enjoyed by whole families, in fact.
I'd like to take just a moment now to give you an example of the kind of multi-layered process that's involved in turning fact into fiction. As I said, The Tale of Hill Top Farm is set in 1905, just weeks after Norman's death, when Beatrix comes to Sawrey to look at the property she is purchasing. She spends some time eagerly going over her hill with a tape measure, as she puts it. But the villagers, as she confides in her letter of October 10, 1905 to Harold Warne, regard her purchase as a "huge joke":
Dear Mr. Warne,
Thank you very much for your letter, the parcel of books, and the cheque. The latter is acceptable, and will, I hope, inspire the natives with rather more respect for me; I will pay it in on Friday.
My purchase seems to be regarded as a huge joke; I have been going over my hill with a tape measure.
As I read this letter, Beatrix is writing with her customary dry irony and with the consciousness that she herself is both the subject and object of the village's scornful amusement. I have enlarged her phrase—a "huge joke"—and turned it into one of the central conflicts of the book. That is, the Sawrey villagers find it impossible to believe that this wealthy London lady who draws animals for children can be "serious" about real animals. They worry that Beatrix's purchase is just another example of the loss of family land holdings to outlanders and in-comers, destroying not only the bond of the people to the land but the social relations that bind persons and families together in a community of common concern.
Here, for instance, is part of a discussion between the village smith and his helper. The scene is set in the smithy, in the main street of Near Sawrey, where George Crook the blacksmith and Charlie, his helper are shoeing Big Bonny, a draft horse.
"Lord only knows what t' spinster lady'll do with t' place," George went on, "her bein' from Lonnun and not a brain in her head for animals . . . Anybody who puts dressed-up rabbits and such-like in books will ne'er do well as a farmer."
Charlie lifted Big Bonny's massive left hind hoof, holding it between his knees and beginning to extract horseshoe nails with an iron pincer. "Shame t' see cottages and farms sold off to city folk who comes and goes and takes little mind of t' land and t' village," he replied . . .
"Even more of a shame to see good farms bought by rich ladies with no head for farmin'—or fer land-buyin', either," said George, pulling the hot shoe out of the fire and measuring it over Big Bonny's massive hoof. "Did y'hear what she's paid fer it? Nearly three thousand pounds, fer only thirty-four acres. Old Jepson sold it to her fer double what he paid t' timber merchant, just a few months ago. Took fer a reet fool, she was." With a scornful grin, he tapped the shoe with his hammer on the anvil to size it, then quenched it in a wooden bucket, where it gave a satisfying sizzle, as if it had been the spinster book lady herself.
"That's t' trouble with rich folk," Charlie said, taking the steaming shoe in one callused hand and filling his mouth with horseshoe nails from the pocket of his leather apron. "They got too much money. Jepson would've sold Hill Top to Silas Tadcastle more reason'ble, if t' rich lady hadn't happened along and bid up t' price. . . "7
I love this process of taking a small fact—in this case, Beatrix's phrase a "huge joke"—and bringing it to larger life in a context that invests it with it significance and poignant irony. For what George and Charlie cannot know—nor Beatrix herself, at this point in her life—is that this wealthy "Lonnun lady," so seemingly ill-suited to be a farmer, will become one of the Lake District's most energetic and effective champions, and that her legacy of love for the land and the animals who shaped it will help to ensure its survival.
For me, the pleasures of telling Beatrix's life in fictional form are almost too many to count. High on the list, I must place the rich enjoyment derived from doing the research, in the company of scholars like Judy Taylor and Linda Lear, who has been generous enough to share her outstanding work with me as it has developed and kind enough to read and comment on my manuscripts.
But at the very top of the list is the enormous privilege of coming to know, in great depth, a remarkable woman, at a time of remarkable change in her life, and to share her remarkable story.
1Robin Paige (pseudonym), Death at Gallows Green, originally published by Avon Books, 1996, reprinted by Berkley Books, 1998.
2Judy Taylor, ed. Beatrix Potter's Letters. Frederick Warne, 1989. The following letters gave me ideas for potential fictionalization: to Harold Warne, October 10, 1905; to Millie Warne, October 14, 1905; and to Millie Warne, April 5, August 5, September 6, and October 12, 1906.
3I am relying on Leslie Linder's A History of the Writings of Beatrix Potter (Frederick Warne, 1971) for information about Potter's sources and her text and illustration of specific books.
4For the true story of this interesting event, see Judy Taylor, Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller, and Countrywoman, revised edition. Frederick Warne, 1996.
5Near Sawrey: An illustrated map with descriptive text. Marian Werner and Richard Pearson, for The Beatrix Potter Society, 1999.
6This scene occurs in Chapter 3 of The Tale of Hill Top Farm (Berkley Books, 2005), entitled "A Town Mouse Meets a Country Cat."
7Susan Wittig Albert, The Tale of Hill Top Farm, excerpted from pp. 9-11, paperback edition. Berkley Books, 2005.
