Gwen Raverat
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Gwendoline "Gwen" Darwin (1885-1957) was a celebrated English wood engraving artist who co-founded the Society of Wood Engravers in England. She was the daughter of George Howard Darwin and the grand-daughter of Charles Darwin. She married the French painter Jacques Raverat in 1911 and lived in Venice in the south of France until his death in 1925.
She illustrated a number of books both with her distinctive line drawings and characteristic wood engravings, and prints from her original wood blocks are much sought after today. Before they moved to France, they were part both of the Bloomsbury Group and of Rupert Brooke's Neo-Pagans. Eventually she settled back in Cambridge where, in 1952 she published her classic childhood memoir Period Piece which is still in print 53 years later. In 2004, her grandson, William Pryor edited the complete correspondence between Jacques, her and Virginia Woolf which was published as Virginia Woolf and the Raverats. Darwin College, Cambridge occupies both her childhood home and the next door Old Granary where she lived for the last years of her life.
Reference
- Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood, first published in 1952 by Faber & Faber. ISBN 1904555128 (hardcover) ISBN 0571067425 (paperback)
The Customer Reviews on Amazon (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1904555128/qid=1110539009/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_10_1/202-6752714-0690261) explain why the book remains so popular.