Period Piece (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)

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.

Biographies & Memoirs

RAVERAT, Gwen

Arts & Literature

University of Michigan Press

Period Piece

PERIOD PIECE is Gwen Raverat's account of her Victorian childhood in Cambridge.  The granddaughter of Charles Darwin, she was later famed for her wood-engravings, many of which illustrate these stories, and her associations with the Bloomsbury Group.  In this masterpiece of comic writing, Raverat brings to life her eccentric aunts and uncles with snapshots of an extremely individual family.  There was Aunt Etty, fussy and "far from calm" and Uncle Richard with his egg-shaped waistcoat and fuzzy, waggly beard, whose socks always fell down.  It is also a great social memoir, describing life in the late 19th century, growing up amid the fads and fetishes of academic and Victorian England.  It is clear why this witty and irreverent book became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic when it was published in 1952.

Period piece: a Cambridge childhood

Faber&Faber

Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood

Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood of Darwin's Granddaughter

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Faber and Faber

Period Piece is the classic memoir of a Cambridge childhood, written by Charles Darwin’s granddaughter. It evokes a time when long summer days were disturbed by nothing noisier than a horse, and long winter nights were lit only by candle or gas lamp. It is a shrewd, touching and comic portrait of eccentric relations, and of Cambridge society when it was small enough to be treated as an extension of the family. As a young girl Gwen thought it impossible that she could ever succeed as an artist, and yet the observations of the small incidents of life, recorded here in delightful prose and beautiful illustrations, reveal an artist’s careful eye.

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Soundings Ltd

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 &amp; 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.

Virginia Woolf & the Raverats: A Different Sort of Friendship

Pryor, William

WOOLF, VIRGINIA

Raverat, Jacques

Clear Books

Collectors' Library

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Books by RAVERAT, Gwen