Beatrix Potter’s name seems to be cropping up everywhere. First there was the news that an unpublished story, The Tale of Kitty-In-Boots, has been discovered in the archives of the Victoria & Albert Museum, and is to be published later this year, illustrated by Quentin Blake. Then a beautifully designed pamphlet arrived on my desk, published by Perth and Kinross Council. A Fascinating Acquaintance tells the story of Potter’s friendship with postman Charles McIntosh from Inver, not far from Dunkeld, who was an expert on fungi. It’s not perhaps the most obvious cement for holding together a long and fruitful relationship, but then few of us have Potter’s fascination with flowers and plants and undergrowth. Potter said she never knew which of them was the shier – as a girl, she first ran away at the sight of McIntosh coming up the path on his rounds – but over the years their affinity grew. That this is the fifth edition of this booklet indicates how popular and useful it has proved for those who live or pass through the area, describing not just the background to Potter’s time here, but to McIntosh and the Victorian rural way of life.

What has held my attention, however, has been a most unassuming looking publication, from The Beatrix Potter Society, titled Beatrix Potter and Scotland. This contains six lectures, given to the Sixteenth Beatrix Potter Society International Conference in Birnam, in June 2014. And lest you fear, as initially I did, that this is the literary equivalent of an anorak, it was chastening instead to discover how erudite, fascinating, and compelling, all these talks are. The authors range from a historian, librarian, geography teacher and professor of literature to a custodian at the V&A, a diversity of backgrounds reflected in their subjects. American Federal fund expert Kathy Cole, for instance, discusses the author’s complicated feeling for cats, reflecting, among others, on the long-lost Tale of Kitty-in-Boots, which was submitted to her publisher Harold and Fruing Warne in 1914. This little black cat, it seems, is far from cuddly. She is a hunter, who sneaks out at night to go poaching, in the process injuring a ferret, and herself becoming caught in a trap. As Potter comments, unsentimentally, “It was very sad; but Miss Kitty ought not to have gone out on the sly, poaching. It served her right.” In the end, she loses nothing more than a toe.

A tale about cat-skinning, trapping, with a trigger-happy heroine, it is not perhaps surprising that it did not appeal to her publisher. Potter, however, was miffed: “I was a good deal damped by neither you nor Fruing seeming to care much for the story, and then it was too late to think about another. It is very difficult to keep up to a fixed level of success.”

All this offers an insight into the mind of this far from twee writer, but also to the political backdrop against which this particular book was written. But in another of the talks, and the one I find most absorbing, Potter features only tangentially. This is the contribution by Emma Laws, of the V&A, who looks at Beatrix’s artist brother, Bertram. To judge by the landscapes included here, he was a most accomplished painter, somewhat in the manner of Millais, who was a friend of his father. His work is brooding, spiritual, and morbidly atmospheric, and Beatrix also thought him by far the better draughtsman. Theirs, it seems, was a very affectionate bond. An unhappy young man, Bertram shared the family love of Scotland, especially the borders. Unknown to anyone except his sister, he eloped to Edinburgh with the daughter of a wine-merchant from Hawick, a wife he kept secret for years. Later, like Beatrix, he became a farmer, near Ancrum. And while he died at the age of 46, in 1918, his sister took comfort in recognising how much happier he had been in his final years on the farm, despite the bouts of depression that afflicted him.

Bertram’s is a tale worthy of Thomas Hardy, suffused with regrets, subterfuge, and corrosive issues of class, appearances and drink. Yet what his interests and abilities reflect is the extraordinary talent of this family, and their shared love of the countryside. Nor was it enough to depict it in their drawings and paintings. They both had to get their hands and boots dirty.