Beatrix Potter SAL progress and Mrs. William Heelis

Beatrix Potter SAL progress.....or lack of it! I am not posting a progress photo as there is little to show with the very few added stitches. I will however continue with my Friday stories of Beatrix's life.

Beatrix became engaged to the country soliciter, William Heelis in 1912. The photo above shows them at their engagement.


From Margaret Lane's book"The Tale of Beatrix Potter":

".....on the fourteenth of October, in the parish church of St. Mary Abbot's, Kensington, Beatrix Potter became Mrs. William Heelis.

The honeymoon was spent at Sawrey, in a furnished bungalow above Castle Farm, where the cottage -- bigger than Hill Top and more convenient -- was being got ready for them. Hill Top had given Beatrix Potter all thet freedom and most of the happiness she had known, but she felt that it was too small and primitive for her husband, and was unwilling to alter it. The rooms at Hill Top were tiny; the Cannons, at their end of the house, lived at close quarters -- one could hear their voices through the communicating door and the ring of pails in the dairy -- and the only water supply was a pump in the yard. All this, of course, could have been altered, but she loved it too much to change. So Hill Top was kept as it was, the beds aired and the rooms swept and the windows open, while Beatrix Potter made a second home for herself, only the breadth of a narrow field away."

"And immediately the atmosphere of her life changes. Calm, and the certainty of sympathy and happiness succeed the divisions and disappointments and enforced patience of her single life. She was by temperament eminently suited to a useful and unpretentious married life, and she knew it. She settled into her new position with touching pride."

"In those few months her life had undergone a profound change. She was approaching fifty, and all the best of her creative work was done. As Beatrix Potter she already enjoyed a little measure of fame, and was financially independent' but the change from Miss Potter to Mrs. Heelis went far deeper than the name. It was as if, disliking so much about her earlier life that she could hardly bear to be reminded of it, she deliberatlely buried Miss Potter of Bolton Gardens, and became another person. Mrs. Heelis of Sawrey, who for hte next thirty years awas to be known as a dominent, shrewd, good~humored and salty charachter of the Lake Country, was absorbed in the life which Beatrix Potter had always wanted, and had achieved only by snatches of her possession of Hill Top, and expressed with love and poetic thruth in her art."

Photos of Hill Top Farm and Mr. and Mrs. William Heelis on their wedding day ~ 14 October 1913.