Beatrix Potter: artist, scientist, environmentalist
In her book review [Los Angeles Times], Regina Marler writes, “Beatrix Potter was a dutiful Victorian daughter who grew into a plain-spoken and determined artist and entrepreneur. She was good, but she was not always nice. Between the lines of Linda Lear’s sympathetic biography, “Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature,” can be glimpsed a feisty perfectionist, a beardless Mr. McGregor laying traps for rabbits.
“Born in London in 1866, Potter spent much of her affluent childhood alone or in the company of governesses. She loved to draw and was largely self-taught, copying from books and sketching wild animals that she and her younger brother, Bertram, had caught and tamed. Rabbits, lizards, snails, bats, rats, newts, snakes and hedgehogs joined the household — many unsentimentally skinned and boiled after their deaths, their skeletons preserved for study.
“To improve her sketches of mushrooms, Potter began to study fungi and eventually to theorize about how different species reproduced. Her research led her to suspect that lichens were a hybrid life form: organisms composed of both fungi and algae. Another century would pass before the precise nature of the symbiosis would be determined — a posthumous vindication of her work.”
She also purchased a number of farms and was active in the preservation of much of the Lake District in England.
[Photo: A fifteen-year-old Beatrix with her dog, Spot - from Wikipedia]
In his book “Solitude,” a celebration of creative solitude, the late British psychiatrist Anthony Storr points out that creativity is often linked to seclusion. Henry James, Beatrix Potter, Franz Kafka, Beethoven - all were loners.
More on the page solitude
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science
writing : teen/young adult
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