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Raverat, Gwen

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

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20240704120039 ‘A Utopia of tea-parties, dinner-parties, boat-races, lawn-tennis, antique shops, picnics . . .’

‘A Utopia of tea-parties, dinner-parties . . .’ | Period Piece

Greetings from somewhere between Hoxton and Cromer as we journey to East Anglia for our summer soirée at The Holt Bookshop in Norfolk this evening. For this week’s news we thought we’d make a stop in Cambridge along the way, and transport you to Gwen Raverat’s childhood home in an old mill house on the Backs along the river Cam where ‘there was plenty to see; nearly all the life of Cambridge flowed backwards and forwards over our bridge, and before our house’.
20240704100016 Gwen Raverat, Period Piece, Sketch Scene Illustration

Period Piece Extract | ‘It was a Utopia of tea-parties, dinner-parties, boat-races, lawn-tennis, antique shops, picnics . . .’

In the spring of 1883 my mother, Maud Du Puy, came from America to spend the summer in Cambridge with her aunt, Mrs Jebb. She was nearly twenty-two, and had never been abroad before; pretty, affectionate, self-willed, and sociable; but not at all a flirt. Indeed her sisters considered her rather stiff with young men. She was very fresh and innocent, something of a Puritan, and with her strong character, was clearly destined for matriarchy.
20230310163005 Gwen Raverat, Period Piece - Plain Foxed Edition

Period Piece | Chapter VII: ‘Aunt Etty’

I have defined Ladies as people who did not do things themselves. Aunt Etty was most emphatically such a person. She told me, when she was eighty-six, that she had never made a pot of tea in her life; and that she had never in all her days been out in the dark alone, not even in a cab; and I don’t believe she had ever travelled by train without a maid. She certainly always took her maid with her when she went in a fly to the dentist’s. She asked me once to give her a bit of the dark meat of a chicken, because she had never tasted anything but the breast. I am sure that she had never sewn on a button, and I should guess that she had hardly ever even posted a letter herself. There were always people to do these things for her. In fact, in some ways, she was very like a royal person. Once she wrote when her maid, the patient and faithful Janet, was away for a day or two: ‘I am very busy answering my own bell.’ And I can well believe it, for Janet’s work was no sinecure. But, of course, while Janet was away, the housemaid was doing all the real work; and Aunt Etty was only perhaps finding the postage stamps for herself, or putting on her own shawl – the sort of things she rang for Janet to do every five minutes all day long.
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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