FAME can be measured in footnotes, judging by the hefty wodge in Linda Lear's Beatrix Potter: A Life In Nature. They occupy almost as many pages as the whole of Margaret Lane's A Tale of Beatrix Potter, the vivid biography published in 1946, three years after Potter's death at the age of 80.

Lear takes a more scholarly approach. An American professor of environmental history, she has spent the past 10 years minutely re-examining a relatively private life, which has been picked over by many others. No significant insights emerge.

Lear's strength is in taking a broad view of Potter's determination to express her talents, giving due space to her achievements as amateur mycologist, writer for children, artist, botanical illustrator, estate manager, sheep breeder, ecologist and conservationist.

What might seem to be contradictory character traits are shown to flow from the pressures experienced by an intellectually gifted, financially privileged woman growing up in a society that placed repressive constraints on women's career options.

Although patently strong-minded, Potter lived with her parents well into middle age, generally accepting their authority with good grace.

Left much to her own devices as a child, she accumulated a menagerie of bats, rabbits and hedgehogs, her companions in the absence of playmates and the objects of close observation, an early sign of her zest for scientific enquiry. Fascinated by anatomy, she once boiled down a fox and resassembled the bones.

As a child, she spent many family holidays in the Scottish hill village of Dalguise in Perthshire, awakening her passion for landscape. At Dalguise, Potter also met the naturalist Charles MacIntosh of Inver, who encouraged her in her study of fungi. She was deflected from pursuing a career in science in her late 20s when her groundbreaking paper on the symbiosis of fungi and lichen was presented to the Linnaean Society, only to be rejected with "contemptuous incredulity".

Potter kept a journal written in code, but the code has long since been broken, revealing unexceptional details of everyday life. The cruelly curtailed "love affair" with her publisher Norman Warne, who died weeks after their engagement, forms the dramatic pivot of the current film Miss Potter. In real life, despite her age, she would have been chaperoned while in his company. Their mutual regard developed through their business correspondence.

Fourteen years later, aged 50, she married a Lake District solicitor, William Heelis. Her parents, whose wealth came from cotton mills, regarded both Warne and Heelis as being "in trade" and therefore unsuitable. Their power over their children is shown in the fact that Beatrix's brother Bertram had been married for over a decade to a a Hawick publican's daughter before he owned up to matrimony.

Lear gives an interesting account of Potter's relationship with the Warne family. Warne's sister Millie was a friend and confidante. His brother Harold, who almost brought the firm down with crooked dealings, unsettled Potter's confidence but this was only a temporary breach and such was her loyalty to the Warnes that she bequeathed her copyrights to them in her will.

They remain her publishers to this day.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit first appeared in a tiny edition privately printed for the author. It became an instant success when it was published a year later in 1902 under the Warne imprint.

Potter's career as a children's writer was largely concentrated over the next 13 years.

After she became Mrs Heelis, she grew tired of rabbits and devoted her energies and considerable fortune to accumulating 44 farm estates in the Lake District, purchased with the intention of conserving a highly specific grammar of landscape and human habitation.

She came into her own as an independent businesswoman and conservationist. Most of her neighbours were unaware that the "off-comer" who took such an interest in breeding Herwick sheep and the famous author were the same woman.

Potter's stories are often learned by heart before a child can read, becoming ingrained in their oral inheritance. Her delicate, precisely observed watercolour illustrations are impregnated with a gentle cheekiness and are integral to the charm of her books.

Sales recently crossed 150 million, but the figures don't fully convey how fondly and firmly characters such as Peter Rabbit and Mrs Tiggy-Winkle have been woven in the texture of childhood - and parenthood - across a century.