Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

An ingenious mouse has been raiding our kitchen: climbing onto the table, helping himself to apples and grapes and tearing bread from its plastic wrapper. Seeing a trail of grapes leading towards a hole in the skirting I imagined him making swag bags out of the shredded plastic. My husband asked: had I been reading Beatrix Potter?

I had, in anticipation of the V&A’s new exhibition “Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature” (until 8 January 2023), for which the Kensington museum has teamed up with the National Trust – to which Potter left her original book illustrations – and the Armitt Library in Ambleside, to which she bequeathed her drawings of fungi.

In her late twenties it was touch-and-go whether Potter’s narrative genius might be lost to mycology. In fact it was partly down to the rejection of her 1897 paper “On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae” by the all-male Linnean Society of London that it wasn’t; five years later, The Tale of Peter Rabbit hit the bookshops. (A hundred years later the Linnean Society apologised for its sexism over that decision.)