Woman of the Week - Beatrix Potter (28 July 1866 – 22 December 1943)

(Helen) Beatrix Potter (28 July 1866 – 22 December 1943) was best known for her children's books featuring Peter Rabbit, but was also a noted botanist and mycologist.

Beatrix Potter was born in Kensington, London on July 28, 1866. Educated at home, she had little opportunity to interact with other children. She spent a great deal of time with her pet animals, however, and sketched them for hours on end. Gradually, Potter's sketches became better and better, evidence of her talent at an early age. As a teenager, she chloroformed and stuffed a long-eared bat, and then took careful measurements. For her drawings, dead rabbits were boiled and their skeletons preserved in the name of anatomical accuracy. Potter's was an instinctive professionalism.

When Beatrix Potter came of age, her parents appointed her their housekeeper and discouraged her intellectual development, instead requiring her to supervise the family's household. An uncle tried to enroll her as a student at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, but she was rejected because of her gender. Undaunted, she focused upon finding, identifying and painting fungi with extreme scientific accuracy and insight. At the time, painting was the only way to record microscopic images. By 1901, Beatrix Potter had completed some 270 paintings of fungi. Today, this amazing collection is housed in the Armitt Library, Ambleside.

Because of her paintings – and despite of her gender – Potter became respected throughout England as an expert mycologist, a botanist who specializes in fungi. Later, she became one of the first mycologists to suggest that lichens formed a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae. Potter's studies of spore germination and the life cycles of fungi were also significant. In 1897, her paper on the germination of spores was presented to the Linnaean Society by her uncle - women were barred from attending meetings. In a similar gesture, the Royal Society snubbed Potter by refusing to publish her technical papers. One hundred years later, England's national academy of science issued a posthumous official apology to Potter for the way she had been treated.

Along the way, Beatrix Potter's life took a turn that drew her away from science. She wrote a story to accompany pictures of rabbits that she had drawn, naming her book The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Potter's story was such a success that she began a new career, writing children's books such as The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, The Story of Miss Moppet, and The Tale of Two Bad Mice. In these stories, Potter's animal characters are delightfully drawn with the same attention to accuracy and detail as her scientific illustrations. They also convey her same love of the natural world.

Potter's books earned her a fortune, but the demands of her new career gave her little time for science. Sadly, she never returned to her research. In doing what she is now known for best, Beatrix Potter wrote and illustrated a total of 23 books about the adventures of Peter Rabbit and his friends.

Resources:

http://www.astr.ua.edu/4000WS/POTTER.html