In February 1943, Beatrix received a copy of an article comparing her work to Blake (visionary poet and painter), Palmer (landscape mystic), Constable (the greatest English landscape painter), Bewick (master wood engraver), and Caldecott (Victorian illustrator, after whom America's most prestigious children's book award is named). She wrote back to the author, a critic called Janet Adam Smith, to say she had read it with "mingled gratitude and stupefaction." The writer, she noted, seemed to know a great deal more about the inception of the Peter Rabbit books than she did.
Then: "And for goodness sake don't write any more rubbish about me."
She signed it: H. B. Heelis (Mrs W. Heelis).
She was seventy-six years old. She had been married for nearly thirty years. An earlier envelope from the same correspondent had been addressed to "Miss." She noted, in a postscript, that "when a person has been nearly thirty years married it's not ingratiating to get an envelope addressed to 'Miss'."
This was not bad temper. It was a position she had held for thirty years, defended with increasing patience, and was not about to abandon because a magazine had decided to compare her to Constable.
The Name
She married William Heelis in October 1913 and within a fortnight was signing her letters "Beatrix Heelis." Not gradually — immediately. The name Beatrix Potter had belonged to a London life, a parents' house, a publishing imprint. Mrs. Heelis lived in Sawrey, managed farms, and bought and sold Herdwick sheep.
The two identities were not the same person, or at any rate she did not intend them to be. When an American editor at The Horn Book — a children's literature magazine in Boston — wrote seeking biographical details about "Beatrix Potter," she provided a statement that handled the question in her own way:
"Beatrix Potter is Mrs William Heelis. She lives in the north of England, her home is amongst the mountains and lakes that she has drawn in her picture books. Her husband is a lawyer. They have no family. Mrs Heelis is in her 60th year. She leads a very busy contented life, living always in the country and managing a large sheep farm on her own land."
She added: "I don't think anybody requires to know more about me."
The statement is written in the third person, as if describing someone else. Beatrix Potter is Mrs. William Heelis. She has been subsumed. The author is the farmer now.
To the same editor she wrote, separately: "I do hate anything like advertisement."
The Clothes
The gap between what the public expected and what they found was sharp.
People who had read the little books arrived in Sawrey expecting to meet something fey and gentle — a woman of delicate sensibilities who drew rabbits. What they found, if they found her at all, was a stout woman in floor-length tweeds and clogs, with mud on her boots and no time to spare.
She was seen at the Eskdale Show — an agricultural show in the Cumbrian valley — in a boiler suit (a one-piece work overall, the kind worn by farmhands and mechanics), washing up and serving dinners to shepherds. She attended the Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association meetings from 1926 onwards and discussed liver fluke and ram fairs and the management of fell land in the language of someone who had been doing it for decades, because she had.
She was not performing the farmer to escape the author. She was a farmer. The clogs and the boiler suit were not a disguise. They were what you wore when the work required them.
Two Houses
After the wedding, she and William Heelis lived at Castle Cottage — the house across the road from Hill Top, which she had bought in 1909. Hill Top itself stayed as it was: furnished with her grandmother's pieces, the William Morris wallpaper still on the walls, everything as it had been during the years when she wrote the Hill Top tales.
She received "book visitors" at Hill Top — people who had come to see where Peter Rabbit lived. She let them come. She was not there.
This was not indifference to her own work. It was precision. Hill Top was where Beatrix Potter the author had worked. Castle Cottage was where Mrs. Heelis the farmer lived. The two addresses kept the two identities separate, and she kept them separate deliberately. When fans arrived at Hill Top hoping to meet the creator of the little books, they could look at the kitchen and the garden and the view across to Esthwaite Water. She would be somewhere else, seeing to the sheep.
The Letters
Her correspondence with her publishers in later years was not warm.
To Fruing Warne, who was hoping for a new book for 1921, she wrote: "You don't suppose I shall be able to continue these d...d little books when I am dead and buried!! I am utterly tired of doing them, and my eyes are wearing out."
She offered to try for one or two more "for the good of the old firm," but made her feelings plain. She was not being difficult. She was being honest. She had written twenty-three books in the years when the work was in her. By the time she married, the books were behind her and the land was in front of her, and she did not see why anyone should find that arrangement surprising.
She had, in her own estimation, "done her bit."
The Farmers
In the Herdwick Sheep Breeders' Association — the body of fell farmers who kept the ancient Herdwick breed on the high ground — she was known as Mrs. Heelis. Not as Beatrix Potter, not as the creator of anything. As a farmer who knew what she was doing.
She chaired meetings, corresponded on questions of livestock disease and wool prices, and signed her letters "H.B. Heelis." In March 1943, a few months before she died, she was elected President-elect of the Association — the first woman ever chosen for the role.
The vote came from fell farmers — people who knew what a good Herdwick looked like and had no particular interest in children's books. She had been working alongside them for forty years. That was the point.
What She Left
She died in December 1943 and signed her will as Helen Beatrix Heelis. She left William her royalties for his lifetime, and after that, they reverted to the Warne family — the "Beatrix Potter" side of things, returned to where it had come from. What she held onto was the land. Fifteen farms and more than four thousand acres, left to the National Trust — the charity that holds land in perpetuity for the public — with instructions about the preservation of the Herdwick breed and the Lakeland landscape.
In 2005, the National Trust named its central office building "Heelis." Not "Beatrix Potter." Heelis.
She would have considered that the correct choice.
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