The real Lady Windermere

As a lover of Oscar Wilde's plays, sooner or later I had to visit Windermere, the place where he wrote his play, Lady Windermere's Fan. The Irish writer composed this social comedy in the summer of 1891 when he traveled to the Lake District to stay with Robert Ross, his good friend. Thanks to the new railway from Kendal to Windermere, it had become a popular destination for affluent Victorians. Not everyone was happy with the train, however. "Is then no nook of English ground secure / From rash assault?" William Wordsworth wrote.

It's striking that the railway never reached Lake Windermere itself, the largest lake in Great Britain, at 11 miles long and with an average width of a mile. The word "lake" is actually a tautology, as "mere" is Old English for "lake." The steam train's final stop was at the village of Windermere, a mile from the water. Only the village of Bowness is on the edge of the lake; a place that, thanks in part to Beatrix Potter, has become a magnet for tourists, especially those from the Far East. The author lived on the other side of the water, in the woods around Near Sawrey.

In Bowness, I boarded one of Windermere Lake Cruises' boats for a tour of the islands, of which there are eighteen in total. Although, erosion has reduced Maiden Holme to just a tree on a rocky outcrop. Belle Isle, I learned, was the only privately owned and inhabited island. There's a round villa there. Architect John Plaw drew inspiration from the Pantheon in Rome when he designed it. A thick planting of trees—privacy!—ensures that it's barely visible from the water. This is different than the Victorian villa called Eellborough on the sparsely populated Potter side of the lake.

On the right is the house of a certain Mrs. Grafton, who lived here with her cats and dogs a century ago. This single woman firmly believed her pets possessed souls, which is why she dressed them up every Sunday and took them to Mass at the chapel on her land. Not only that, but when one of the dogs or cats had a birthday, she would dress it up in festive clothing and sometimes host a birthday party on one of the islands. Grafton was known for being shy, but during the summer holidays, she was sometimes joined by a young woman named… Beatrix Potter.

What influence did this woman have on Peter Rabbit's mother?