The writer and publisher Judy Taylor, who has died aged 93, had a long and distinguished career in the field of children’s books. Her second career as an expert on Beatrix Potter developed only after her retirement from publishing: in her 30 years at Bodley Head, for 15 years as children’s books editor under Max Reinhardt, she created an important children’s list, nurturing talents such as Maurice Sendak, creator of Where the Wild Things Are.
During their long friendship from their first meeting in 1961, she and Sendak shared a love of Potter’s work. Sendak admired her as an artist and Judy’s enthusiasm was rooted in memories of being read The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle as a child. As a children’s books editor, Judy appreciated the groundbreaking creative work of Potter, but she was also fascinated by her as an early conservationist and a hands-on farmer in the Lake District, where Judy herself went to school.
This interest in Potter was turned to practical use in 1981 when Potter’s publisher, Frederick Warne, woke up to the huge commercial opportunities offered by its most famous author. In order to form a strategic and careful approach, the firm formed a Beatrix Potter steering committee, and invited Judy to join it. She persuaded the Warne management to appoint the Copyrights Group agency to handle the development of a major licensing programme.
In 1984 the Warne board decided to sell the company to Penguin. Judy remained on the advisory committee and continued to approve merchandise and advise on the publishing programme under the new team, which I headed from 1986. It was soon realised that a fresh assessment of Potter’s life and work was needed. Much new material had come to light since the first biography by Margaret Lane in 1946, and so Judy was commissioned to write Beatrix Potter: Artist, Storyteller and Countrywoman (1986).
As well as drawing together everything known about Potter, Judy allowed Potter’s drawings, copious correspondence and her journal to tell the captivating story of a well-to-do Victorian girl who managed to escape the restrictions of her time. Although much has been written since about Potter’s life and work, for me Judy’s book remains the definitive account.
She was born Julia Bell; her mother died soon after Judy’s birth, in Wales, and she was adopted by her aunt, Gladys Taylor, a governess who moved about where jobs came up, taking Judy with her. Aged eight she was sent to board at Fairfield school in Ambleside, in the Lake District. As a teenager Judy attended St Paul’s school for girls in London, but the money ran out and she was sent to Canada to work as a mother’s help. It was shortly after her return that she joined The Bodley Head in 1951 as an office junior.
That era is often called the golden age of children’s books and she was one of its doyennes, working with publishers and authors across the English-speaking world; in 1971 she was made an MBE for services to children’s books.
While Judy would go on to publish herself, including her Sophie and Jack series of picture books illustrated by Susan Gantner, about two little hippos (1982), her outstanding skill lay in supporting, complementing and revealing the talents of others. Sendak owed Judy not only his first publication in the UK, in 1967, for which Judy had to fight hard within Bodley Head, but also quite possibly the rest of his life and work.
During that first year, they were on an author tour in Newcastle when Sendak woke Judy in the middle of the night complaining of chest pains. Overruling the hotel’s doctor, who diagnosed indigestion, Judy insisted on calling an ambulance to take him to hospital, where he was found to have suffered a serious heart attack. It was fitting that in 2003 she accepted the Astrid Lindgren memorial prize on his behalf when he could not be there himself.
Promoting children’s reading was always important to Judy. In 1973 a charity called Volunteer Reading Help was founded by a friend, and Judy gathered a group of volunteers in London who went into primary schools to spend time reading with individual children. When she moved to Gloucestershire after retirement and her marriage to Richard Hough, a publisher and naval historian, in 1980, she continued volunteering and used her contacts in the publishing world to acquire books and materials for local schools.
In 1984 Judy joined the recently formed Beatrix Potter Society and over the next 35 years contributed many papers, talks and articles as well as serving on the committee in several roles including that of chair, becoming joint vice-president in 2012. For the National Trust, which owns Potter’s Lake District farms and with whom Potter worked on conservation during her later life, Judy wrote two guides.
Over the next years Judy edited many works on Potter, including collections of her letters, and contributed to catalogues for exhibitions and books to mark particular events. In 1996 she collaborated with Patrick Garland on the play Beatrix, which premiered at the Chichester festival theatre and starred Patricia Routledge. It was later aired on BBC Radio 4.
Judy continued to advise us at Warne over such projects as reoriginating all the book drawings to improve the reproductions in the endlessly reprinted Little Books. And when she disagreed with the Warne team, for example over the animation of Peter Rabbit in the early 1990s, an idea that Potter herself had early on refused to allow, Judy said so clearly, while still managing to maintain friendly relations. In all things she took a pragmatic view.
Richard died in 1999. Judy is survived by three stepdaughters, Sarah, Alexandra and Deborah, eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
• Judy Taylor Hough, publisher and author, born 12 August 1932; died 2 September 2025
