The oldest licensed toy in history, a coded diary that took five years to crack, and a strategic buyout of more than 4,000 acres to block developers were all the work of the Victorian woman who painted Peter Rabbit. This episode dismantles the cozy image of Beatrix Potter, starting with her isolated childhood in West Brompton, where she and her brother kept bats, mice, and hedgehogs, boiled dead specimens down to skeletons, and where she kept a journal in a homemade cipher from age 14 to 31.

We follow her serious work in mycology, mentored by Charles McIntosh, her success germinating fungal spores on glass plates, the dismissal by Kew Gardens director William Thiselton-Dyer, and the 1897 paper a male colleague had to present to the Linnean Society because women were barred from the room. Blocked from science, she self-published 250 copies o ...