But Beatrix Potter was much more than Peter Rabbit. She was a literary subversive, employing the interplay between the wild and domestic worlds to help her worldwide readership view and interact with the natural world differently.

Meet the Beatrix Potter you didn't know you didn't know.

Much of her story lies in the journal where she sketched the artwork that would become synonymous with her name. But her real story lives in the coded text accompanying those sketches, coded text that chronicles both her discovery and harnessing of her personal power, anathema to Victorian gender norms.

Although much is made historically of how Beatrix’s connection to the vicar Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley enhanced her writing career, there are also hints that his wife Edith was Beatrix’s true guide. Yet it’s virtually impossible to find information about her. It’s as if she’s been erased.

THE BEATRIX POTTER DEFENSE SOCIETY explores that erasure in an attempt to crack the code of how Edith and Beatrix may have set each other on anarchic-for-the-times journeys of artistic independence.