First of all, thanks to Crystal for inviting me to make a guest appearance on her beautiful blog. I'm delighted to be here!

Let me begin by telling you a little about Beatrix Potter, the author-illustrator who created Peter Rabbit. I'm writing a series of family-friendly mysteries about her, so I've been doing quite a bit of research into her life. I've also visited her home, in the English Lake District, and seen her doll's house there. I think you'll be interested in hearing about it.

Beatrix was born in 1866, just after the close of our American Civil War, to wealthy parents who lived in London, in a large brick house at Number Two Bolton Gardens. She and her brother younger Bertram spent most of their time in their third-floor nursery, where they also had lessons together until Bertram was old enough to go to school. Beatrix continued to study at home, with her governess.

As a girl, Beatrix didn't care much about dolls. She remembered having only a black wooden doll and a stuffed pig. Instead, she and Bertram collected animals. On their two-month annual holidays, the family went to Scotland, where Beatrix and Bertram played in the woods and fields. Every year, they brought mice, hedgehogs, rabbits, frogs, lizards, and even a tortoise back to London with them—a real zoo! And because Beatrix also loved to draw, she filled her sketchbooks with drawings of her animals.

It wasn't until Beatrix grew up and began writing and drawing stories for children that she became interested in doll houses. In fact, her interest may have begun in 1904, with a book called The Tale of Two Bad Mice, about two mice—Tom Thumb and his wife Hunca Munca—who invaded a doll's house. "Once upon a time," she wrote, "there was a very beautiful doll's house."

Now, Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca were Beatrix's pet mice, and she could readily use them as models for the mice in her story. But she needed a model for the house she wanted to draw. For that she turned to her editor, Norman Warne, who later became her fiancé. Norman had built a doll's house for his niece Winifred, and Beatrix used it for a model. She bought some furniture to draw and Norman gave her some plaster "food" for the table—a ham, lobster and fish, a roast duck, apples and oranges—and a little stove for the kitchen. "The ham's appearance is enough to cause indigestion," Beatrix wrote in a thank-you letter to Norman. "I am getting almost more treasures than I can squeeze into one little book."

In order to show off all these domestic treasures, Beatrix created a series of comic scenes in which the mice try to eat the ham, fish, and cheese—and are disappointed, disillusioned, and then enraged when they discover that everything in the wonderful house is make-believe. Even the rice and coffee in the tiny canisters turns out to be nothing but little red and blue beads!

But there are some things Tom and Hunca Munca want for themselves, to decorate their mouse hole and make it more comfortable. So they start stealing the furniture, a feather bolster, a bird cage and a bookcase, and the baby's cradle. Eventually, they return most of the things to the dolls, Lucinda and Jane, but Hunca Munca keeps the baby's cradle and some of the dolls' dresses for herself. The mice pay for the damage they did with a six-pence Tom finds under the hearth rug, and Hunca Munca comes as often as she can to clean house for the dolls. So the tale of two bad mice ends happily, after all.

Beatrix didn't acquire her own real doll's house until many years later, in the late 1930s. (It came from the home of Rebekah Owen, whose estate Beatrix helped to dispose of.) If you visit Hill Top Farm, Beatrix's first home in the Lake District, you can see the doll's house there, in the "treasure room" on the second floor. You can also see full-color photographs of it in Susan Denyer's book, At Home with Beatrix Potter, on pages 76-77.

The outside of Beatrix's doll's house looks like brick and somewhat resembles the house that Norman built for his niece. The front opens up to reveal a two-story interior, which is filled with many of the furnishings Beatrix used as models in The Tale of Two Bad Mice.

In the kitchen is the table at which the two squabbling mice in Beatrix's story might have sat when they tried to eat the make-believe ham and fish, and there on the table and the floor are the very dishes of doll-house food. There is a sideboard, and a sink and pots and pans and other kitchen items. The baby's cradle—exactly like the one in the story—sits in the nursery, along with a little bed and a wash basin and pitcher. The upstairs parlor is crammed with all sorts of late Victorian furnishings—"the kind of house where one cannot sit down without upsetting something," as Beatrix wrote to Norman. Chandeliers hang from the ceiling, and there are miniature paintings on the wallpapered walls. In fact, the two round miniatures on the walls of the parlor are tiny paintings of the daughters of Annie Moore, Beatrix's former governess.

I think that Beatrix must have wanted this particular doll's house because it reminded her of the one Norman built for his little niece, and perhaps of the home they might have had together. From the letters she wrote him while she was writing and drawing Two Bad Mice in 1904, it is clear that their relationship was growing warmer and deeper. Perhaps it was in drawing and painting the doll's house—furnished with items that Norman had bought her—that Beatrix began to want her own home and to think that it might be possible to have that home with Norman. By this time, she was 38 and obviously destined to be a spinster. Having her own home must have seemed like a dream, an impossible fantasy.

But her fantasy almost came true, for Norman Warne formally proposed to her just a year later, in July, 1905. Happily, Beatrix said yes and accepted his ring, but it was not to be, for her parents objected. Mr. Warne was only a tradesman, they said, and of a lower class than Beatrix—it was not a suitable marriage. We don't know how their story might have turned out, because tragically, Norman died just a month after they were engaged, and the only house they ever shared was the imaginary doll's house she created in the pages of The Tale of Two Bad Mice.

But Beatrix did go on to create a home of her own, the beautiful Hill Top Farm, which she bought after Norman's death. She furnished Hill Top with the same loving care with which she later furnished her real doll's house. You can get an idea of her taste in furnishings in the lovely painting "Tea Time at Hill Top," by Steven Douglas, which pictures the kitchen in which Beatrix spent so many happy hours. A few years after she bought Hill Top, she fell in love with Willie Heelis. They were married in 1913, and went to live in Castle Cottage, just a little distance away. But Beatrix spent a part of almost every day at Hill Top, which she loved. And that's where you can see her doll's house today.

The Tale of Hawthorn House is the fourth book in my eight-book series. It's a fantasy ("an adult fairy-tale," as one reviewer put it) that I think would please Miss Potter, who believed very firmly in fairies. I hope you'll enjoy it. And maybe you'll even be lucky enough to win one of the three copies we're giving away to readers of "Fairibees"! Go here for all the details of this drawing and the grand prize drawing we're doing at the end of the tour.

And if you want to read the other posts in my blog tour, you can go here for the schedule.