Beatrix Potter in Cumbria: Pastoral Pleasures, Classic Commodities, Rural Modernity

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article claims Beatrix Potter, author of the children’s classic The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), is a woman writer of and for rural modernity whose complex relations to rural and urban places, national and regional identities, fine and commercial arts, raise important questions about the gendering of green places, landscapes, and geographies in constructions of canonical modernism and children’s literature. Analysing research by biographers, rural historians, geographers, art historians, and critics of modernist and children’s literature, it argues that Potter’s acute measurement of the commercial possibilities that lay in the divide between rural real and rural ideal made her one of the most successful women writers of her generation and contributed to the early achievement of classic status of her twenty-three animal Tales (1902–1918). Enlisting close readings of Potter’s words and images in her Tales for an interdisciplinary feminist literary-geographical project, the article situates Beatrix Potter at the centre of studies of rural modernity and rural modernity at the centre of early twentieth-century women’s writing.