Linda Lear, award-winning biographer of Rachel Carson (Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature published in 1997 and reprinted by Houghton Mifflin in 2009, has given Connecticut College her research archive for her biography of Beatrix Potter. Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, was first published by St. Martin's Press in 2008. During the course of her research, Dr. Lear compiled a substantial archive of manuscripts, largely copied from other repositories and private collections, documenting Beatrix Potter's childhood and her career as an author and illustrator, naturalist, and conservationist.