Period piece: a Cambridge childhood

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

Biographies & Memoirs

Raverat, Gwendolen Mary Darwin

Arts & Literature

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Period Piece (Ann Arbor Paperbacks)

Memories of a turn-of-the-century childhood by the granddaughter of Charles Darwin

Arts & Photography

Univ of Michigan Pr

Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood

Gwen Raverat, the granddaughter of Charles Darwin, described Period Piece, her classic memoir of an English childhood in the late 19th century, as a drawing of the world when I was young. The observations of the small incidents in her life, recorded here both in pen portraits and line drawings, reveal an artist’s careful eye. Vividly evoking a bygone era, it is a shrewd, touching and comic portrait of her childhood, her eccentric relations and of Cambridge society and university. Since she was renowned as a book illustrator, it is not surprising that her line drawings for Period Piece are a masterpiece of controlled wit and charm all on their own.

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