Beatrix Potter: a life in nature Linda Lear Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 583pp, £25

It comes as no surprise to learn from Linda Lear's biography that the young Beatrix Potter had a number of pets, but the scale of the menagerie is startling. At one time there were "two rabbits, a green frog, several lizards, water newts, a tortoise, salamanders, many mice, a ring snake, several bats, a canary and a green budgerigar, a wild duck, a family of snails, several guinea pigs and a hedgehog or two". Her brother Bertram, six years younger, also had a kestrel and a "mean-tempered jay". When the pets died, in the interests of scientific research the children always boiled the corpses and preserved the skeletons; the bones "were then articulated, measured, drawn, labelled and preserved".

This combination of the anthropomorphic impulse and a scrupulous regard for scientific truth is a large part of the appeal of Potter's books. Despite his blue coat and black shoes, Peter, her most celebrated hero, is a closely observed portrait of a rabbit behaving as rabbits do. Potter never shied away from the casual brutality of the food chain, from an owl with its claws in a squirrel or a meal of rabbit pie. Children appreciate the truth, and if it is served up by a fox in a frock coat, then all the scarier.

What is surprising, though, is that the young Potters lived in London, in South Kensington. Beatrix was born in their large house in Bolton Gardens in 1866 and lived there for the next 46 years. But in this exhaustive, somewhat prolix biography, Lear does not tell us where all the animals lived, or what the smell in the nursery was like: these kinds of details are not her style. She is a dogged chronicler of the tangled avenues of publishing, of proofs going back and forth and new editions being prepared; she has explored in depth Potter's somewhat imperious relationship with the National Trust - she left it 4,300 acres of farmland in the Lake District on her death in 1943 - and she has a vivid sense of the landscape that inspired her; she also traces in detail the histories of the Manchester Unitarian cotton manufacturers who were the source of the Potters' wealth.

Lear is particularly good on the 19th-century world of amateur naturalists such as Potter, of private enthusiasms that became serious scientific studies. Although Potter's parents encouraged their children's interest in the natural world (they never went walking without sketchbooks) and Beatrix's artistic talents, they appear, in other respects, to have been appalling - though marginally less so when one remembers the social context from which they came. The psychology of the insecure third generation of the industrial revolution's manufacturing giants is one of the sidelights shone by this biography. Rupert Potter was a barrister, though not an energetic one, and an enthusiastic amateur photographer; his wife spent much of her time paying social calls in the small social circle (northern, Nonconformist, new rich) to which they belonged.

But the Potters had aspirations - when Beatrix wanted to marry her publisher, Norman Warne, they wouldn't countenance it because he was "in trade". She was 39 and Warne was 37; they had never met without a chaperone (when no one else was available, she had to take her family cook to business meetings) and their courtship was conducted through shared work and letters. She lost him anyway, because Warne died of leukaemia a month after he had proposed. Years later, the Potters were horrified when Beatrix announced she was to marry William Heelis, a solicitor from Hawkshead in the Lake District, but this time she went ahead anyway. She was 46 and had made a great deal of liberating money from her own enterprises - which included not only the writing of phenomenally successful books, but the canny marketing of merchandise such as wallpaper and toys.

Potter's brother Bertram also suffered: he kept his marriage to a tradesman's daughter a secret for 11 years. Bertram is one of many characters about whom I'd like to have heard more, and who are insufficiently coloured in by Lear. None the less, this book has usefully marshalled the facts and painted in the background on the woman who showed us the cruel and beautiful world of Mr MacGregor's garden.

Lucy Lethbridge is literary editor of the Tablet

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