By The Baltimore Sun
It’s tempting to imagine Peter Rabbit peering out from beneath a hedge in author Linda Lear’s bewitching English-style garden.
Lear recently published a biography of Beatrix Potter, the British author who created such beloved characters as Benjamin Bunny, Jemima Puddleduck and Squirrel Nutkin in her illustrated children’s books.
Potter’s animal heroes are easy to picture amid Lear’s home on lushly wooded acres and terraced beds in Bethesda, Md.
Although it just was released last month, “Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature” already is in its fourth printing. Book sales were racked up even before the major U.S. release of “Miss Potter.” The film, starring Renee Zellweger as the title character, is scheduled to roll out next month to hundreds of markets nationwide.
Spend eight years writing a biography, as the 66-year-old Lear has done, eight years poring over a diary written in code, over voluminous correspondence about topics as varied as fungi, toy manufacturing and sheep breeding, and subject and author can begin to converge in weird ways.
“My life and Beatrix Potter’s life have some points of correspondence,” Lear admits. “I suppose that’s why I identify with her.” Lear’s similarities to her subjects become even more striking upon learning she wrote an award-winning biography of the environmentalist Rachel Carson. All three women – Lear, Potter and Carson – are passionate about the natural world. (Lear is a longtime professor of environmental history.) All three mix artistic leanings with a scientist’s curiosity.
Carson, author of the groundbreaking “Silent Spring,” was an exceptional prose stylist, and Potter was a brilliant amateur botanist who made an important discovery about how lichen reproduce.
All three are known as world-class observers. The Beatrix Potter book alone contains 106 pages of footnotes and citations.
Judy Taylor, chairwoman of the Beatrix Potter Society, is impressed with how much Lear was able to absorb about an era so different from her own.
“It must have been very hard for her, as an American, to write about someone who lived in Victorian times,” says Taylor, the author of a previous Potter biography, “Beatrix Potter, Artist, Storyteller and Countrywoman.” “It must have been difficult for Linda to get her around how the English class system worked in those days. But she did it beautifully.”
She and her husband, John Nickum, live in a home in Bethesda that they built eight years ago and share with their four dogs: three Norfolk terriers and a West Highland terrier, whose favorite activity is barking at Peter Rabbit – or, at least, some of his kin.
Botanical prints adorn the walls of the couple’s light-filled home.
Lear’s study contains a loveseat decorated with a Peter Rabbit pillow; figurines of Potter’s characters rest on her bookshelves.
All her life, Lear has responded to natural beauty – and been distressed when that beauty is disturbed or destroyed.
“Whenever my parents drove over the Allegheny River into downtown Pittsburgh from the rural community where I was born, I begged my father not to take the bridge that passed above the stock yards,” Lear has written.
“There were animal parts visible in the yard, and debris strewn along the river’s edge. The smell of dead animals mixed with the stench of sulfur from the smelting operations farther down river. It always made me sick to my stomach.” So, when she later learned that Rachel Carson also grew up in western Pennsylvania, and, Lear says, “abhorred the same things I did,” she felt as if she’d discovered a kindred spirit.
But in the 1950s, when Lear started college, the environment wasn’t considered a viable academic subject on par with calculus or the romance languages.
But Lear always had loved history, the way that dusty documents filled with dry data could be a secret passageway taking her into a world that, while long-gone, was brimming with life. Over the years, she perfected her research techniques, eventually earning a Ph.D. from George Washington University in 1974.
In the mid-1980s, an exciting new field, environmental history, beckoned. Lear put together a course for her students at George Washington. Naturally, the class focused in part on Carson, the Maryland crusader who first alerted the world about the dangers of pesticides. But when Lear began searching for a biography of Carson for her students, she couldn’t find one.
“People thought Rachel Carson might have been a lesbian,” Lear says, adding that in the course of her research, she reached a different conclusion. “But, that was one of the reasons her life story had never been written.” The more Lear dug, the more she wanted to learn about Carson. In 1994, she temporarily stopped teaching to devote herself full time to her “classroom biography” a project that eventually consumed a full decade. (Lear now teaches part time at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.) The more Lear dug, the more connections she discovered between herself and the environmental writer.
Laurie Deredita, director of Special Collections and Archives at Connecticut College, where Lear has bequeathed her research papers, praises Lear’s “extremely meticulous, thorough and exhaustive” research.
“For the Rachel Carson book, she went to every archive, and tracked down every single person who knew Carson and who was still living,” Deredita says. “And if the original sources were dead, Linda tracked down their children.” “Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature” later was honored by the History of Science Society as the best book of 1988 on women in science.
And it was Rachel Carson, in a way, who led Lear to Beatrix Potter.
In 1997, Lear embarked on a book tour that took her to London’s Science Museum. As she was leaving the lecture, she came across a display of exquisite drawings of fungi.
“I know something about this subject, and the drawings just blew me away,” she says. “But there wasn’t any sign saying who had done them. I poked around, and found that it was Beatrix Potter.” The more Lear dug, the more captivated she became.
“There are so many extraordinary aspects of her life that have been neglected in the focus on her children’s books,” she says.
Lear began work on the new biography. In particular, she was determined to illuminate the Beatrix Potter who found fulfillment by interacting with the natural world.
“She discovered how fungi reproduce, though no one listened,” Lear says.
“She even understood and observed the antibacterial properties of penicillin. And she was a great conservationist who bequeathed more than 4,000 acres to the National Trust. England wouldn’t have a Lake District today if it hadn’t been for Beatrix Potter.” In addition, Lear says, Potter was a canny businesswoman who, for better or worse, created the monster known as spinoff merchandising.
“She created a Peter Rabbit doll and patented it almost the moment she finished the book,” Lear says. “She mocked it up, and she put shot in its feet so it could stand.” What unites these different activities, Lear says, is that Potter was determined “to do something useful with her life. Whenever one avenue of creativity and purposefulness was closed, she found another way.” She’s not the only one.
Lear doesn’t know yet what her next project will be.
If she needs inspiration, she can always sit down at her desk, with her Beatrix Potter pillow and her Beatrix Potter figurines. She can look out the window into her garden, at the trees that change with the seasons, and at a stream trickling over rocks. Lear never can tell what she will find there. Maybe a story.
