Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections
Frances Spalding
438pp, Harvill, £30
For those who succumb to its innocent charm, Gwen Raverat's childhood memoir, Period Piece, is an expensive habit. Since its first publication in 1952, the book has been passed down through generations of families, treasured, quoted, and frequently read aloud. One reviewer contemplated sending the author a bill, "as buying copies for people has nearly ruined me this Christmas".
Dipping into Period Piece is like gorging in a literary sweetshop. Every aspect of Raverat's late- Victorian childhood has a fondant, fairy-tale texture, dusted with a sheen of sugary nostalgia. Raverat remembers the Cambridge of her childhood as a lucent world of tea-parties, lawn-tennis, new bonnets and remarkable young men. Life skips along with little vexation, though Raverat admits it might seem too perfect to be true: "There must have been some difficulties, even in those days," she reflects. "Indeed, all the right sleeves of my mother's dresses would keep getting too tight, from the constant tennis."
Raverat's discreet cynicism is the worm at the heart of her paradise. Her unerring humour brings an adult perspective to bear on her childhood experience; throughout the book she mocks the things she celebrates. Cambridge's beauty was not without an attendant squalour - particularly the dreamy River Cam, which flowed past her childhood home, rank and toxic with the town's raw sewage.
Period Piece's bestseller status came as a complete surprise to its author, who wrote it at the age of 66 with no immediate view to circulating it outside her family. Raverat described it as "a circular book", without beginning or end, but one which rotates continually, "sticking out like the spokes of a wheel from the hub, which is me".
Though she may not be the most immediately recognisable figure of her generation, Gwen Raverat made a truly remarkable hub. Frances Spalding's authoritative biography has little difficulty locating Raverat at the centre of the Cambridge intellectual aristocracy. She corresponds with Virginia Woolf, studies at the Slade with Stanley Spencer, acts in a collegiate production of Milton's Comus alongside Rupert Brooke, tours Italy with André Gide, discusses the poems of her cousin Frances Cornford with Siegfried Sassoon, and the music of her second cousin Ralph Vaughan Williams with Eric Gill. Behind all this looms the massive, dominating presence of her grandfather, Charles Darwin.
Raverat was born in 1885, three years after Darwin's death, and grew up believing that her illustrious grandfather "was obviously in the same category as God and Father Christmas". But Darwin's influence reverberated loudly throughout his large, loyal clan, leading Raverat to wonder if any of their individual voices could be heard. Her five Darwinian uncles (including her father, whom she describes as "only a specialised kind of uncle") are a group of ineffectual, hypochondriac academics, whose individuality and good health have been squeezed out of them by the oppressive security of their upbringing.
"My grandfather said once: 'I have five sons, and I have never had to worry about any one of them.' Well, that is not quite right. One ought to have to worry sometimes about young people, because they ought to be growing out in new ways and experimenting for themselves. But my grandfather was so tolerant of their separate individualities, so broad-minded, that there was no need for his sons to break away from him; and they lived all their lives in his shadow."
Raverat was born with a rebellious streak. Much as she loved her parents, their docility drove her to a private fury of scorn: "I could not have endured the touch of their stupid, kind, sympathetic fingers on my private soul," she wrote. Spalding argues that this resolute individuality propelled Raverat beyond the complacent domestic atmosphere and enabled her to blossom into the most distinguished Darwin of her generation. She achieved this by applying herself to the one field for which none of the dynasty had previously shown any inclination - the visual arts. Raverat's lucid line drawings provide the perfect counterpoint to the quirky prose of Period Piece; but their self-effacing presentation belies the fact that in her earlier career she had been an individual and significant graphic artist, whose major achievement was her contribution to the 20th century renaissance in woodcut printing.
Rupert Brooke identified Raverat as "that square-headed woman who cuts wood". When Raverat went up to study at the Slade in 1908, there was very little interest in wood engraving, which had been usurped as an illustrative method by new photographic techniques. Freed of its reproductive role, the field was left open for Raverat to rediscover the purely artistic potential of wood engraving.
By the early 1920s, she had become a leading figure in the movement which led to the foundation of the Society of Wood Engravers. Her tiny but exquisitely worked pastoral landscapes caught the attention of the agent, critic and art-publisher Herbert Furst, who praised her deep and instinctive empathy with her material; her work never carried the suggestion of drawings transferred to wood, but seemed to have been made "by merely removing the irrelevant matter from the block and so revealing what was already there".
The modest scale of Raverat's wood engravings, rarely more than a couple of inches square, ensures that many can be handsomely reproduced within Spalding's text exactly as they appeared on their first impression. Their presence makes this stylishly produced biography an objet d'art in its own right, while Spalding's prose adopts the economy of the illustrations: austere, pragmatic and wholly devoid of ostentation.
The modesty, precision and lucidity of these images reminds us that however much she railed against her suffocatingly comfortable upbringing, Raverat was inescapably a Darwin at heart - the most visually gifted member of a family who were apt to regard the arts "as the inessential ornaments of life", but whose scientific work, she argued, betrayed many of the characteristics of the creative artist: "The sense of style, of proportion, the passionate love of their subject and, above all, the complete integrity and the willingness to take infinite trouble to perfect any piece of work. Some of them found style difficult, but they did at least know that it mattered."
