Gwen Raverat

Blue plaque commemorating her childhood home on Silver Street, now part of Darwin College, University of Cambridge.

Gwendolen Mary "Gwen" Raverat née Darwin (26 August 1885 – 11 February 1957) was a celebrated English wood engraving artist who co-founded the Society of Wood Engravers in England.

Biography

Gwen Darwin was born in Cambridge, England, in 1885, the daughter of George Howard Darwin and his wife Maud du Puy. She was the granddaughter of the naturalist Charles Darwin and the first cousin of poet Frances Cornford. She married the French painter Jacques Raverat in 1911. They were active in the Bloomsbury Group and Rupert Brooke's Neo-Pagans until they moved to the south of France, where they lived in Vence, near Nice, until his death from multiple sclerosis in 1925. They had two daughters: Elisabeth (born 1916), who married the Norwegian politician Edvard Hambro, and Sophie Jane (born 1919), who married the Cambridge scholar M.G.M. Pryor and later Charles Gurney.

In 1927, Raverat's brother-in-law Geoffrey Keynes asked her to provide scenic designs for a proposed ballet drawn from William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job to commemorate the centennial of Blake's death; her second cousin Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote the music to the work which became known as Job, a masque for dancing. The miniature stage set that she built as a model still exists, housed at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

Eventually she settled back in Cambridge where, in 1952, she published her classic childhood memoir Period Piece, which is still in print over 50 years later. In 2004 her grandson, William Pryor, edited and published the complete correspondence between Gwen, Jacques, and Virginia Woolf under the title Virginia Woolf and the Raverats.

She illustrated a number of books with her distinctive line drawings and characteristic wood engravings, including Period Piece, and prints from her original wood blocks are much sought after today.

Darwin College, Cambridge, occupies both her childhood home and the neighbouring Old Granary where she lived for the last years of her life. The college has named one of its student accommodation houses after her.

Picture of her childhood home, now part of Darwin College.

Bibliography

Books illustrated include:

• Spring Morning – Frances Cornford (Poetry Bookshop, 1915)
• The Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children (n.e.) – Kenneth Grahame (CUP 1932)
• Over The Garden Wall – Eleanor Farjeon (Faber, 1933)
• Les Amours de Daphne et Chloe – Longus (Ashendene, 1933)
• Farmer’s Glory – A. G. Street (Faber, 1934)
• Mountains and Molehills – Frances Cornford (CUP, 1934)
• Cottage Angels – N. C. James (Dent, 1935)
• A New Version of The First Four Tales from Hans Christian Andersen – R. P. Keigwin (CUP, 1935)
• The Runaway – Elizabeth A. Hart (MacMillan, 1936)
• Sentimental Journey – Laurence Sterne (Penguin Illustrated Classics, 1938)
• Mustard, Pepper and Salt – Alison Uttley (Faber, 1938)
• The Bird Talisman – H. A. Wedgwood (Faber, 1939)
• Red-Letter Holiday – V. Pye (Faber, 1940)
• Crossings – Walter De La Mare (Faber, 1942)
• Countess Kate – C. M. Yonge (Faber, 1948)
• The Bedside Barsetshire – L. O. Tingay (Faber, 1949)
• The London Bookbinders 1780-1806 – E. Howe (Dropmore, 1950)
• Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (Autobiography) (1952)

See also

• Darwin-Wedgwood family

References

• Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood, first published in 1952 by Faber & Faber. ISBN 1-904555-12-8 (hardcover) ISBN 0-571-06742-5 (paperback).

External links

• Archival material relating to Gwen Raverat listed at the UK National Register of Archives
• Broughton House Gallery Archive - Accessed 26 August 2009