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Slightly Foxed > An Index to Slightly Foxed > Raverat, Gwen

Raverat, Gwen

Period Piece, [8] 46; [40] 14

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20051201105609 Hazel Wood on Gwen Raverat, Period Piece

A Cab at the Door

Hazel Wood on Gwen Raverat, Period Piece

For me a home without Period Piece is like a house without a cat – lacking an essential cheering and comfortable element. I have loved Gwen Raverat’s memoir of growing up in Cambridge in the 1890s ever since I first read it twenty years ago when recuperating from a bad bout of ’flu, at that blissful moment when you are feeling better but not quite strong enough to get up and do anything. I can still recall the delicious feeling of reading and dozing, dozing and reading, snug in the gas-lit world of Victorian Cambridge, until the January afternoon outside the bedroom window gradually turned purple and faded into dark.
20060301142128 Simon Brett on the wood engravings of Gwen Raverat

Artist of Earth and Sky

Simon Brett on the wood engravings of Gwen Raverat

Despite the aspirations Gwen Raverat expressed in her classic childhood memoir Period Piece (‘O happy Mrs Bewick!’ she declares at one point) and all the drawings in the book, many of its enchanted readers have discovered with apparent surprise that its author was an artist of some importance. Yet this may not be so remarkable; little had been written about her later life until Frances Spalding’s full biography in 2001, though Gwen and her husband Jacques did feature in Paul Delaney’s The Neo-Pagans (1987) as central members of the Cambridge circle surrounding Rupert Brooke. My own journey was in the opposite direction from most people’s. I knew Gwen Raverat as an artist long before I discovered Period Piece.
20131201103024 PFE Gwen Raverat, Period Piece

Cambridge Canvas

Hazel Wood on Gwen Raverat, Period Piece

For almost a decade there’s been one particular book we’ve been longing to reissue.  Now at last, as we reach our tenth anniversary, we’ve got the opportunity to do so. When I wrote about it in one of our very early issues, I said that for me a home without a copy of Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece (1952) was like a home without a cat – lacking an essential cheering and comfortable element – and for me that still holds true.

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