Jessica Miller

But Beatrix wasn't deterred.

She and Norman wrote each other long letters professing their love.

Norman even proposed to Beatrix in a letter, and Beatrix accepted without hesitation.

She was prepared to defy her parents' wishes.

After all, she loved Norman, and unusually for a woman at that time, her commercial publishing success meant she had the financial means to make her own decisions in life.

But their longed-for marriage was not to be.

Less than a month after he proposed, Norman passed away.

Beatrix received the news by telegram while she was on holiday in Wales with her parents.

She went into deep mourning.

When the clouds of grief passed, Beatrix decided to do something rather unusual for a woman of her class.

With the substantial royalties she had earned on the tale of Peter Rabbit, Beatrix bought a property of her own, Hilltop Farm, a small cottage in the Lake District.

Although she continued to live with her parents in Kensington, she travelled to the cottage often.

She threw herself into renovating the shabby 17th-century stone house and even turned it into a working farm, where she bred herdwick sheep.

She was very good at him and would go on to be elected the first female president of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders Association.

Beatrix often retreated to Hilltop to work on her books.

She found the wild nature that surrounded her there inspiring.

The cottage's pleasantly overgrown gardens, with climbing flowers and a vegetable patch where carrots and rhubarb and cabbage grew, often crept into her distinctive watercolour illustrations.

So, too, did the views of the lake district that she enjoyed from her hilltop perch.

Delicate gray-green fields and moors, tumble-down farms and higgledy-piggledy stone fences, and silvery skies where heavy clouds almost always seemed to threaten rain.

Some of Beatrix's best-loved characters came to life in her studio at Hilltop.