Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) is one of the world's best-loved children's authors and illustrators. She wrote the majority of the twenty-three Original Peter Rabbit Books between 1901 and 1913. The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Frederick Warne, 1902) is her most famous and best-loved tale.

In the 1890s Potter sketched illustrations for fairy tales including Cinderella, Puss-in-Boots, Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty. Her later idea to publish her ‘more or less written’ version of Cinderella within ‘a set of fairy tales in thin volumes’ (see Judy Taylor (ed.) Beatrix Potter’s Letters, Frederick Warne, 1989, p.346) never materialised, but some of her manuscripts and sketches can be viewed in the V&A collections. There are two other drawings relating to Cinderella in the Linder Bequest; both depict the subject of Cinderella’s coach and one presents a more finished version of the subject. In Potter’s interpretation, Cinderella’s pumpkin carriage is drawn by three pairs of rabbits, while the coachmen are mice. There is a very light pencil sketch of a frog holding an umbrella, leaping into a boat, on the verso. This may relate to Potter's series of drawings 'A Frog He Would a-Fishing Go' of around 1894.