Beatrix Potter was born in 1866 and raised in a stuffy Victorian home. Her mother’s greatest ambition for her was that she would make a good marriage match. But Miss Potter was not going to settle down just to please her parents. In a time when women were expected to marry and keep house, she was an author and an artist; she fought for land conservation, worked on a farm, and was a first-rate naturalist. Between the 1890s and 1920s Beatrix Potter published more than a dozen books that sold millions of copies and have come to be loved by children around the world.
Miss Potter, from director Chris Noonan (Babe), is based on her remarkable life. Renée Zellweger does a wonderful job portraying this very modern woman in Victorian England; her performance is heart-wrenching as well as uplifting. Beatrix Potter’s life is shown mostly from her 30s onward although we do get a few flashbacks to her childhood. We get a good sense of the family dynamics before the tests that come later, in which Beatrix struggles to have her parents understand her desire to publish her books.
We follow Beatrix as she talks to a publishing company about her children’s book The Tale of Peter Rabbit which was published in 1902. They make her an offer not expecting her book to be anything special and foist her off onto Norman Warne (Ewan McGregor), a young editor just getting started. Norman and Beatrix work very closely together and soon her book is a huge success — a success that her mother is less than happy with.
Beatrix becomes great friends with Norman’s sister Millie (Emily Watson); since both are unmarried and forward thinking for their time, they quickly bond. When Norman proposes it is Millie who encourages Beatrix to choose love over anything else and Beatrix does just that.
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