Beatrix Potter | 1866-1943 In 1901, Arthur Conan Doyle (one year before he was knighted) bought one of the few hundred privately printed copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit for his children. The next year Peter Rabbit became available to a wider audience, and over the next 10 years, Potter wrote and illustrated 20 more books for children, including The Tale of Benjamin Bunny (1904), The Tale of Tom Kitten (1907), The Roly-Poly Pudding (1908), and The Tale of Mr. Tod (1912). Potter's first professional work, in 1890, was for a German greeting card firm, which commissioned her to illustrate a volume of children's verse in 1893. She brought to her work her governess-supervised childhood study of plants and animals, from which she gathered so many of the structural details that are evident in even her early work. John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite painter best known for Ophelia, was a friend of Potter's family and encouraged her work. While her illustrations have none of the gilded ornateness of the Pre-Raphaelites, their influence can be seen in the meticulous attention to detail in her reproduction of nature (if mice wore dresses and carried brooms, they would no doubt look just like Potter's drawing for The Tale of Two Bad Mice). It is not merely the detail of her illustrations and the charm of her stories that have placed Potter at the acme of the "golden age" of children's literature. Rather, her innovative philosophy of children's literature wrought changes that one can still see in books being produced today. Potter believed that children's literature should be for children: The books should be small enough to fit comfortably into a child's hand, and each page of written text should have an illustration to go with it. Partly as a result of her failing eyesight, Potter produced new work only occasionally after her marriage at the age of 46. After her successful career as an author and illustrator, Potter embarked on a second career, this time as a sheep breeder in her beloved Lake District. She is remembered there for her work as a conservationist and an agriculturalist, although outside the Lake District her great fame still rests of her lovely creations for children.