Beatrix Potter is best known for her extraordinary accomplishment in children's literature: the twenty-three illustrated storybooks comprising the Peter Rabbit series. Beginning with The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901) and continuing for three decades, she managed regular output of small storybooks, illustrated with her own subtly detailed watercolors, featuring small animals found in the woodlands, open fields, and sometimes in close proximity to human beings. The care with which she portrayed animals, capturing the nuances of their coloring and their habitats, and the precision with which she told their stories, with vocabularies of more complexity than current easy-to-read picture books, yet clearly defined by context, attest to the focused attention of her pen and paintbrush. Potter's love of things small, as well as her willingness to portray the brutal, sometimes violent, events in the lives of animals, makes her books perennial favorites. Because of their charming miniaturization and her...