Lane, a novelist, uses many of the techniques of fiction to write The Tale of Beatrix Potter. She creates well-defined characters, draws detailed scenes, and even constructs a sort of dialogue through extensive quotations from Potter's own letters and diaries. Lane draws on the memories of William Heelis, friends, cousins, and local people from the village of Sawrey to give this biography a very personal quality.

The narrator's affectionate and admiring voice is strong throughout. Lane recounts with respect and awe how the scholar Leslie Linder worked for years to decode the alphabet cipher that Potter used to write her journal. The reader gets both a sense of how difficult the decoding task was and a portrait of the adolescent Beatrix composing long, detailed journal entries in elaborate code, not because she is being secretive, but because she enjoys the difficulty of writing in code.