The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies sequels are the best known and most successful of Potter's books. The author had an affinity for rabbits; she lived with them as pets and observed them closely for years. Though she once wrote that rabbits were creatures of "warm volatile temperaments" and were "shallow and extremely transparent", she invested her rabbits with a variety of characterizations consistent with the nature of the animal. All the rabbit tales were inspired in part by Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories, which Potter began illustrating as early as 1893 in an attempt to find career direction and probably because they featured a
Joel Chandler Harris the central event in the making of modern children's story." Harris's influence on British children's writers such as Kipling, Milne, Potter, Burgess and Blyton is substantial. His influence on modernism is less overt, but also evident in the works of Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Faulkner. Beatrix Potter illustrated eight scenes from the Uncle Remus stories between 1893 and 1896, coinciding with her first drawings of Peter Rabbit. Potter's family had favored the Uncle Remus stories during her youth, and she was particularly impressed by the way Harris turned "the ordinary into the extraordinary." Potter borrowed some of the language from