Period Piece Format: Paperback

At the close of 1952, Bettrand Russell wrote to Gwen Raverat that he had been reading Period Piece “with the very greatest delight.” Raverat’s memories of childhood and coming of age during the final years of Victoria’s reign capture a young woman’s impressions of dons, eccentrics, and tradespeople in Cambridge during the 1890s. With astonishing power Period Piece brings us into the real presence of the late Victorian past.
 

Gwen Raverat, nee Darwin, was the leading wood-engraving artist of the 20th Century. She illustrated a number of books both with her distinctive line drawings and characteristic wood-engravings, and prints from her original blocks are much sought after today. She married the French painter Jacques Raverat who died aged just 40 from MS. They were both part of the Bloomsbury Group and of Rupert Brooke's Neo-Pagans. Their correspondence with Virginia Woolf is the subject of Clear Press's Virginia Woolf and the Raverats. Gwen Raverat did not start writing Period Piece until she was 63.