Virginia Woolf and the Raverats Limited Edition : A Different Sort of Friendship

Jacques Raverat was a French painter who died of MS aged 40 in 1925. In 1911, he had married Gwen Darwin, granddaughter of the evolutionist and also an artist. They knew Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury well and when they moved to the south of France for his health, their friendship blossomed in a series of long and poignant letters.

The crucial bond was that between Jacques and Virginia. Their correspondence ranged far and wide. Informed by the depressions and uncertainties, the speculation and passion of their bohemian lives, these letters display a complex affinity between three artists facing their own mortality, their weaknesses and the price of their creativity. It is a friendship whose later substance and passion was entirely expressed by letter.

Virginia Woolf & the Raverats is not only a complete record of their correspondence, but includes much previously unpublished material. None of the Raverat letters, the extracts from Gwen Raverat s other writings, her powerful sketches of her husband on his deathbed, nor Jacques paintings have been published before. There are facsimile reproductions of crucial letters, diary and journal entries.

Attributes of the Special Limited Edition:
Designed by Humphrey Stone, using Dante type;
Edited by William Pryor, grandson of the Raverats;
44 black and white illustrations: drawings, wood engravings, photographs and facsimile letters;
Rounded and backed, marker ribbon, head & tail bands with Damascus green Colorplan endpapers;
Quarterbound in cloth with Compton Marbling paper sides, title blocked in gold on spine;
Cloth top and tail slipcase with Ingres laid paper wrap;
Each slipcase contains a separate numbered Gwen Raverat wood engraving, Vence, La Place en été, which she made at the height of this correspondence in 1923, hand-printed by Simon Lawrence of the Fleece Press, from the original boxwood block

William Pryor has been a serial entrepreneur, co-founding Airlift Book Company, founding The Green Catalogue and pioneering music distribution on the Internet. He grew up in Cambridge very aware of being a member of the Darwin family. He is the great-great grandson of Charles Darwin and the grandson of Gwen Raverat.