Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) was an English author, illustrator and naturalist. The Tale of Peter Rabbit began as a picture letter to the sick five-year-old son of her former governess, and after every publisher turned it down she printed it herself, small enough for a child's hands. She was also a serious mycologist whose paper on the germination of lichen spores had to be read to the Linnean Society by a man, women not being admitted. She spent what her books earned on Lake District farmland, bred Herdwick sheep, and left more than four thousand acres to the National Trust.