Full title: The Journal of Beatrix Potter from 1881 to 1897, translated from her code writings by Leslie Linder. I think it's most unfortunately out of print; I got my copy from Amazon used books.
Beatrix started her journal when she was 15, and since there's nothing embarrassing in it, it's not clear why she developed a code (mostly simple substitution) except for more privacy. The book includes an explanation of how it was deciphered and plates showing her early and later styles. Other plates show photographs of Beatrix and family, places she lived, and her early artwork.
Victorian girls were supposed to be sweet, sentimental, feather-headed simpletons, and I love the contrasting picture that emerges here of young Beatrix: confident in her opinions, especially on art; interested in everything; full of common sense. At just 18, reflecting on religion, she wrote "Believe there is a great power silently working all things for our good, behave yourself and never mind the rest." Bracing!
Regarding prudery over nude pictures, she wrote (again at 18) "I do not see the slightest objection to nude pictures as a class, nor are they necessarily in the least more indecent than clothed ones. Indeed the ostentatious covering of certain parts only, merely showing that the painter considers there is something which should be concealed, is far worse than pure unabashed nudity. The shame of nakedness is for the naked, not the observer, and the pictures cannot feel." She is exactly right on the prurience of the half-clothed. Even when young, she refuses to praise what she doesn't like, disdaining Michaelangelo, for instance ("the colour was beautiful but painfully brilliant and hard").
She doesn't say much about her situation as a dependent except to remark a few times how nice it would be to have some money of her own, which seems to have been the chief motivation behind her books. Her wealthy parents kept her on a tight leash. She does reject the Victorian ideal of the Angel in the House (age 29): "There is supposed to be some angelic sentiment in tending the sick, but personally I should not associate angels with castor oil or emptying slops." Again, bracing.
Wherever she goes, she observes (sometimes in exhausting detail). People, landscape, customs, natural history, geology, fungi (a special interest), and always animals. She worries about badly kept livestock, delights in the antics of her various pet animals, and considers the merits of, say, one kind of cow over another. When you read the journal, it's less surprising that the author of Peter Rabbit gave up writing and drawing in favor of husbandry. She used her proceeds to buy one farm, then another and more, and she eventually left a good deal of land to the National Trust, much of which is now the Lake District National Park.
Roger Sale, in his essay on Potter in Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E.B. White, comes away from the journal with the impression that Potter is as straitlaced and humorless as her parents, but I don't know how. She is often quite funny: the station-master at the family vacation spot "is under the delusion that our name is Potts; we are constantly and invariably taken for the servants, but Mrs. Donaldson did remark that she thought my father was a very gentlemanly man for a butler." Sale has a lot of good observations in that essay, but I think he misses something essential about Potter.
This is a delightful book for dipping in and out of. Not every section is riveting, but nearly every page holds something interesting and original. I very much want to read a good biography of her now, and especially learn more about her married life as Mrs. Heelis, breeding prize-winning sheep and preserving land in the Lake District.
