‘Over the Hills and Far Away’: the life of Beatrix Potter
MATTHEW DENNISON

In 1913, aged 47, Beatrix Potter married William Heelis, a solicitor from Hawkshead.  She had just published her nineteenth book, The Tale of Pigling Bland. The marriage lasted for 30 years until her death: the little story, while still in print, remains extremely odd. It features two piglets, with licences pinned inside their waistcoats, heading cheerfully to market in Lancashire.  One disappears, but the other, taking a small Berkshire pig by the hand, escapes across the bridge to Westmorland, and thereafter “over the hills and far away”.

My father, a proud Westmorland man, opined that Potter might not have been sober while writing this. Matthew Dennison prefers to see it as reflecting a kind of resolute optimism, prompted by its author’s escape from conventional expectation. Either or both could be true.

This enjoyable, thoughtful, impressionistic biography is only sometimes chronological, for Dennison generally chooses to consider his subject psychologically, through the medium of those “little books”. In the first chapter alone he references several: the Potter parents led, like Little Pig Robinson’s aunts, “prosperous and uneventful lives”; her father drew a picture of a duck in a poke bonnet long before the creation of Jemima Puddle-Duck; her mother’s eight-course menus rivalled those of Johnny Town-Mouse while her tea parties were reproduced by Tabitha Twitchit. It’s an intriguing method, much enhanced by Dennison’s elegantly laconic narration. Rupert Potter’s many photographs of his wife, for example, “suggest that Helen Potter mistrusted levity”.