In 1952, almost 10 years after Beatrix Potter’s death, the young Philip Larkin received a letter from his sometime girlfriend, Patsy Strang, in which he was reprimanded for his sentimental attitude to animals. In Larkin’s account of the letter, which he relayed to another of his girlfriends (Monica Jones), Strang had accused him “of not liking animals at all, only Potter ones & ones on my mantelpiece”.
“I felt somewhat at a loss,” he confessed to Jones: “I do sometimes feel ashamed of liking these sweet little bunnies . . . But the emotion is there & she touches it . . . Of course I’m not going to stop reading Potter.”
Potter’s biography might be read as a kind of pre-emptive response to this exchange, for it tells the story of a woman in whom an intense love of the fantastic and the sentimental could and did sit alongside a view of the non-human world that, while always loving, was robustly practical, lucid, rational.
Potter’s childhood love of, and belief in, fairies and the Loch Ness monster would stay with her throughout her adult life, but she was sturdily un-squeamish about the realities of the natural world. If, as a teenager, she encountered dead animals, they would be “boiled, stripped of fur and flesh and reassembled as skeletons” to be stored in her “little bone cupboard”. There was wonder in “the beautifully minute differences and fittings together of the bones”.
As an adult, while writing tales of mice wearing bonnets and ducks wearing shawls, she remained committed to the importance of granting children access to the savagery of nature. When the Protection of Animals Act 1911 was passed, Potter protested on the grounds that it would deny children under the age of 16 the right to visit slaughterhouses.
Conflicting aspects
One of the great strengths of this biography is that it allows us to see how these ostensibly conflicting aspects of Potter’s sensibility could co-exist in a state of near symbiosis, each making itself present – sometimes conspicuously, sometimes subtly – in her work and deeds. That Dennison should be able to reveal this without having conducted any original archival research – the book’s notes and bibliography suggest that it is essentially a synthesis of the best Potter scholarship of the past half century – is testament to the care he has taken to think freshly about a writer who often feels safely sanitised, cutely tamed, blandly familiar. Most of us think we know Beatrix Potter – there she goes with a rabbit on a lead. Dennison makes us think again.
Beatrix was born in Kensington, London, in 1866 to Rupert and Helen Potter. Both parents were unambitious; adherents to Unitarianism; demanding and controlling of their daughter. In order to preserve the isolation in which they assiduously attempted to keep her (she was never allowed friends – a prohibition that lasted well into her adult life), they had her educated at home by an assortment of nurses and governesses. Under their gaze Beatrix found salvation from her feelings of intense loneliness, largely in the form of drawing and reading. By the age of seven she had memorised all six cantos of Sir Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake.
Potter endured this quiet, sickly and largely unhappy existence with stoicism. She immersed herself in a bewildering menagerie of pets, and in the study of art and literature. By 1890, at the age of 24, she had sold a series of six designs to the art publisher Hildesheimer & Faulkner. By 1902, with the publication of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, she had found swift and enormous success as a writer.
There followed, at the age of 39, a brief engagement to Norman Warne (who died of leukaemia before the pair could marry) and the purchase of a farm – Hill Top – in the Lake District.
In 1913 Potter married the “dreadfully shy” William Heelis, with whom she lived a simple and contented life, devoting herself to farming and conservation. She died of pneumonia and heart disease in 1943, bequeathing the National Trust more than 4,000 acres of land (including 15 farms) and an endowment of £5,000.
Intimacy
Dennison tells this story with great economy and insight, and with a clear-sightedness that allows us to see his subject with uncommon intimacy: the Potter that emerges from his pages is complex, contradictory, fully faceted.
But above all she is admirable: self-possessed, brave, eccentric, committed, generous. You wish you had known her. She was capable of showing others great kindness while being “terribly afraid of the future” herself.
Her deep love of animals, and of the natural world, was constant, vigorous and inclusive – over the course of her life she cared for dogs, canaries, kestrels, tortoises, lizards, frogs, bats, snails, hedgehogs, mice, rabbits, owls, and an assortment of farm animals (including a pet pig named Sarah). She became a leading breeder and celebrant of Herdwick sheep.
Despite her natural shyness, and regardless of the conventions and the censure of others, she was prepared to laugh at herself and be herself. Towards the end of her life she described herself as “a good-tempered witch”; laughed when one day on the Windermere ferry a tramp took her for a fellow vagrant; wore sack on her shoulders to protect her from the rain; and attached a large rhubarb leaf to her head to shield her from the sun.
Over the Hills and Far Away may be a relatively brief and brisk book, but Dennison's attentiveness, intelligence and lack of sentimentality make it a work of weight and substance that carries the distinction of seeing its subject whole.
Potter once referred to “the deepest me, the part one has to be alone with”. Dennison’s achievement is to have sounded those depths, and to have shown us something of their scale.
Matthew Adams is a literary critic
