The Tale Of Peter Rabbit

"Now, my dears," said old Mrs. Rabbit one morning, "you may go into the fields or down the lane, but don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden."Beatrix Potter loved the countryside and she spent much of her otherwise conventional Victorian childhood drawing and studying animals. Her passion for the natural world lay behind the creation of her famous series of little books. A particular source of inspiration was the English Lake District where she lived for the last thirty years of her life as a farmer and land conservationist. The Tale of Peter Rabbit, published in 1902, was her first book, expanded from an illustrated letter she had sent to a young friend who was ill. One hundred years later the classic tale of naughty Peter Rabbit's escape from Mr. McGregor's garden still brings to children all over the world the pleasure that it gave to its very first reader.Author BiographyBeatrix has created some of the best-loved characters in children's literatureBeatrix Potter was born in London in 1866. During her rather lonely childhood and later, as a young woman, she studied art and natural history. She acquired her love and knowledge of the countryside during family holidays, at first in Scotland and then in the Lake District. She started her career as children's author and illustrator in 1901 when she was thirty-five. In the years before the First World War, demand for her work was so great that she was publishing an average of two new stories a year. As she became financially independent, she was able to buy some land in the Lake District and in 1913, on her marriage to solicitor William Heelis, she moved to live there permanently. For the last thirty years of her life, writing and illustrating gave place to a second career as a sheep farmer and countryside conservationist.Her little books never lost their popularity however and today they sell in their millions, translated into numerous languages, and the pleasures of those timeless tales continue to be enjoyed by children all over the world.