For many writers, the most important part of the ‘room with a view’ for their writing is the view. For Victor Hugo, whose writing space I visited in this series last week, it was a view over the sea to his beloved France.

For many writers, though, what can be glimpsed through a window is not enough. They do not need to see a setting so much as be in it, a part of it. They need a landscape to which they can connect and be inspired.

I have written before of the Brontë sisters’ home, the parsonage at Haworth. For one of the sisters, Emily, it was the surroundings at Haworth that sparked her creative ideas. A painfully shy lady, she was happiest in her own company roaming on the moors near her home, and this wild, rugged moorland setting became the core inspiration for her classic novel Wuthering Heights.

Another English writer for whom the landscape was of the utmost importance to her writing was Beatrix Potter.

Beatrix, born in 1866, holidayed as a child near Lake Windermere in the Lake District and at Dalguise in Perthshire, Scotland, and the untouched beauty of the landscapes there inspired in her a fascination for natural history. She studied everything from fungi to flowers to bats to mice, and she filled sketchbooks with likenesses of everything from the natural world that intrigued her.

View towards Lake Windermere in the Lake District

Beatrix made a study of nature, but at a time when academia was not open to women, which was a source of frustration for her. She had another interest as well, though: illustrations, most often of rabbits and mice. It was only when a publishing company bought some of Beatrix’s drawings of Benjamin Bunny to illustrate a book that Beatrix realised her artistic ability may have the potential to earn her money – which, as a women striving for independence, she very much wanted.

Beatrix used as the basis for her first book a story she had told in a letter for a friend’s son about ‘four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter’.  She could not find a publisher willing to take on her book, and so in 1901 Beatrix, strong woman that she was, decided to publish it herself. A family friend, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, loved the book, and took it around some London publishers. One, Frederick Warne & Co, saw the potential in the book now that they could see it fully formed, and they republished The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

The rest, as they say, is history. Peter Rabbit was a big hit with readers, and over the ensuing years, until the First World War, Beatrix published two or three books a year, 23 in total. A true trailblazer, she even came up with merchandise to tie in with the books, like a Peter Rabbit teddy and little figurines.

What made Beatrix’s work so popular was, without doubt, the beautiful way in which she depicted creatures of the English countryside – and that countryside itself. Thus Beatrix’s literary work was so deeply rooted in its setting that the former could not exist without the latter.

The profits from all of her books made Beatrix a wealthy lady, and in 1905 she bought Hill Top Farm in Near Sawrey, near Windermere in the Lake District.

Hill Top Cottage

The inspiration that this beautiful setting provided is evident in all the books she wrote in this period. Aspects of Hill Top itself featured often in Beatrix’s illustrations, especially those in The Tale of Tom Kitten and The Tale of Samuel Whiskers – everything from the range to the staircase to the tea set.

Hill Top was not Beatrix’s permanent home; she lived in London, and then at Castle Farm in Near Sawrey from 1913, after she married. For Beatrix, Hill Top was a studio, a place to be inspired, to write and to illustrate.

Beatrix so loved the Cumbrian landscape around Hill Top that she began to use the proceeds from her books to buy land in order to protect it. Her friend Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley had founded the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, and she supported his work. She developed a passion for sheep farming, and was determined to do her all to preserve the native sheep of the Lakes, the Herdwick sheep, and the historic fell farming.

When Beatrix died, aged 77, in 1943, she left as a legacy more than 4,000 acres of land to the National Trust, along with many of her original illustrations. She stipulated that her beloved Hill Top should be left as it was – her home and her studio. Today, the cottage is open to the public, and it affords a wonderful glimpse of the work and inspirations of Beatrix, who so loved this place and its environs.

There is much more to Beatrix’s story (notably, a lost love), and she is such a fascinating woman for her time. If you’d like to know more about her then you may enjoy the Miss Potter film, staring Renée Zellweger and Ewan McGregor, and I found Linda Lear’s biography most compelling: Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature: The Extraordinary Life of a Victorian Genius (Penguin, 2008).