‘This is a circular book,’ the artist and writer Gwen Raverat explains at the start of her much-loved memoir, Period Piece. ‘It does not begin at the beginning and go on to the end; it is all going on at the same time, sticking out like the spokes of a wheel from the hub, which is me. So it does not matter which chapter is read first or last.’ Published by Faber & Faber in 1952, Period Piece: A Memoir of a Cambridge Childhood is Gwen Raverat (née Darwin)’s account of growing up as a member of the extended Darwin clan in Victorian Cambridge, where her father and two uncles wereattached to the University. Told with droll humour and observational astuteness, this little book has never been out of print in the UK, and as the winter solstice approaches it makes perfect, nostalgic reading, with a promise of spring around the corner. So my own circular post here is a tribute to Period Piece, sketching Gwen Raverat’s life through six ‘mini-chapters’, beginning and ending with her house by the river.
The house by the river
Maud DuPuy, a twenty-one-year-old woman from Philadelphia who was passionate about drawing and painting, was spending the summer of 1883 seeing the great sights of Europe. She began her continental tour by visiting Cambridge, staying with her aunt Caroline Jebb (the ‘exceedingly beautiful’ Aunt Cara of Period Piece). Cara/Caroline was the wife of a Classics don and she introduced her niece to 38-year-old George Darwin, the second son of Charles Darwin and a professor of astronomy at the University. It was not love at first sight on Maud’s part, but the normally reserved George was smitten and followed her to Italy where the couple became engaged a few months later. Cara was delighted for her niece, but anxious that the Darwin family might suspect (quite rightly) that she had engineered the match. ‘If there is a suspicion of my being a matchmaker,’ she told George, ‘I utterly and entirely repudiate it...’ (letter, March 13 1884).
After their marriage Maud put away her paintbrushes, as her aunt predicted. George hired the architect J.J. Stevenson to turn a rundown house by the river into a well-appointed family home, which they called Newnham Grange. Their first child, Gwendolen Darwin, was born there in 1885, and three siblings soon followed (one brother died as a baby). From a very young age Gwen was fascinated by her surroundings. ‘The river flowed deep into her consciousness and later became a recurrent motif in her work,’ her biographer Frances Spalding writes. As one of the ‘first hatching’ of university children (until 1882 Fellows had not been permitted to marry), Gwen grew up in close contact with a sociable clutch of her Darwin cousins in Cambridge.
Today’s Darwin College (Cambridge's first graduate college, founded in 1964) incorporates both of Gwen Raverat's former riverside homes, Newnham Grange and the neighbouring Old Granary, which she would move into in 1946, following the Second World War.
Dogs, bicycle fever and corsets
The family's much put-upon dog Sancho and the 1890s craze for cycling are among the highlights of Period Piece. ‘My mother had the first lady's tricycle in Cambridge’ Raverat writes. ‘Our dog Sancho was horrified to think that anyone belonging to him would ride such an indecent thing.’ There are comic escapades on punts and rain-sodden picnics on Grantchester Meadows. Bicycles, the river and playing with her beloved cousins gave Gwen great happiness, as did visiting her grandmother Emma Darwin at Down House and experiencing there, as nowhere else, an intense feeling for the spirit of place. ‘Long after I have forgotten all my human loves, I shall still remember the smell of a gooseberry leaf, or the feel of the wet grass on my bare feet; or the pebbles in the path,’ Raverat recalled in later life. But Maud never stopped trying to make the adolescent Gwen fit the mould of a good Victorian daughter and squeeze herself into corsets; the rage she felt about being forced to attend dance classes and observe ‘propriety’ ripples through the book. ‘Humour, tenderness and affection are the keynotes of Period Piece,’ Hazel Woods writes, ‘but if you look closely there is a fierce and passionate undercurrent that tells you something about the artist Gwen became.’
A struggling artist
Almost every page of this book features one of Raverat's sunny drawings, but in her teenage years clouds gathered over her life. Frances Spalding’s Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections reveals her long and lonely struggle to become an artist. For all her privilege and connections as the granddaughter of Charles Darwin, Gwen did not fit in with her family, and Period Piece hints at this unhappiness. Her kindly parents had ‘hands that understood nothing’ and neither of them understood her artistic drive and craving for independence. In 1908 her long campaign to be given permission to study art in London finally succeeded and she enrolled at the Slade School of Painting and Drawing in Gower Street. Soon her prints and wood-engravings began to be commissioned and to make her money: ‘The little woodcuts by Miss G. Darwin, throwing back to the days of Bewick and Blake, are quite excellent’, wrote The Times critic in 1910.1 It was the beginning of a lifelong career as a wood engraver and book illustrator. In London Gwen made friends among the Bloomsbury set including Virginia Woolf (then Stephen). When she came to Cambridge for a visit the two young women sat in Newnham Grange's garden overlooking the river together, Virginia smoking one of George Darwin’s cigars.
Darkness and light
In 1911 Gwen married Jacques Raverat, a French painter who belonged to her artistic London circle. Their happiness was short-lived; war broke out in 1914 and their close friend Rupert Brooke died on his way to the Dardanelles in April 1915. On the same day, Gwen's cousin and childhood companion Erasmus Darwin was killed on his first day of action at the Battle of Ypres. There were other sadnesses to come. During the war the ailing Jacques was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, then called disseminated sclerosis. The medical specialists could do nothing to help him. Gwen, Jacques and their two daughters, Sophie and Elisabeth, went to live in Vence in the south of France in the hope that the weather would be good for him, but Jacques’s condition slowly worsened and he died there in 1925. His death, after so many years of suffering, would trigger a deep depression in Gwen for the next five years. But with the help of friends and family to look after her daughters, she moved back to England and kept on working and earning the money she needed to keep her independence. She returned to Cambridge in the 1929, so that her daughters could attend the Perse School for Girls.
War work
Raverat’s career as an artist and illustrator continued to flourish during the 1930s. She was a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers, and during the Second World War she turned her drawing talents to government work and for four years helped to produce over fifty Handbooks with highly detailed maps for the Geographical Section of the Naval Intelligence Division. In 1946, with both of her daughters married, she moved into the the Old Granary next to her former home to help to look after her mother. Maud died in 1947, but Gwen decided to stay on at the Old Granary. Living there again, looking the reflections on the river on her walls, and sifting through her mother’s old letters and diaries made Gwen decide to write about her own life. She had always wanted to do this, though she claimed to hate writing, as a way of capturing something of her past. As she told her publisher in 1951, she intended Period Piece to be ‘a social document… a drawing of the world as I saw it when young, not at all as a picture of my own soul (though I suppose that gets in by mistake)’ (quoted in Pryor, see below).
The house by the river again
Writing her memoir was a circling back to the Victorian childhood that, aged 66, Gwen Raverat could still recall vividly, especially now that she was living again in the house by the river. Period Piece was published in 1952 to rave reviews; the novelist and critic Rose Macaulay told her ‘I should really send you a large bill, for buying copies for people has nearly ruined me this Christmas’. Reading Period Piece in the light of Raverat's subsequent life shows just what a remarkable book it still is: fresh, funny and original. Like a peacefully flowing river in the summer-time, the book has powerful undercurrents - but compared to the darker times to come, Gwen Raverat’s Cambridge childhood was light-filled indeed. By writing the book she gave herself permission to return to those happier moments, and enjoy once more ‘the smell of a gooseberry leaf, or the feel of the wet grass on my bare feet; or the pebbles in the path.’
And if you ever get the chance, do sit on the riverbank opposite Darwin College and look at the house and garden where Virginia Woolf and Raverat once sat, daringly smoking their stolen cigars as the summer night drew in. The view from there is lovely.
Sources: The Caroline Jebb quotation is from the Lady Caroline Lane Reynolds Slemmer Jebb Papers held at the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts; other quotations are from Frances Spalding’s Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections (Harvill Press, 2001), the outstanding biography of Gwen Raverat. Her sister Margaret Keynes published her own family history in 1976, called A House by the River: Newnham Grange to Darwin College. The Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge has an almost complete collection of Raverat’s work, including the drawing ‘House by a river’, given in 1974 by her daughters Sophie Gurney and Elisabeth Hambro. You can read her grandson William Pryor’s detailed insights into the background of Period Piece here, the history of Newnham Grange in ‘Capturing Cambridge’ here, and an extract from Emma Darwin’s delightful This is not a Book about Charles Darwin (2019) here. Hazel Woods’s insightful Preface to the Slightly Foxed edition of Period Piece is available to read here. I am grateful to
for sharing Gwen Raverat’s ‘Cambridge Upper River’ (1955) in her ‘Beyond Bloomsbury’ Notes, and starting me on this circular journey.Quoted in Frances Spalding’s Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections (Harvill Press, 2001), p. 170.
I love Raverat and Period Piece, although i found some of it so sad. Here is the quote i used in Nelly...she would have applauded: 'But, anyhow, there was always Miss Mary Greene’s Wednesday drawing class, which was
the centre of my youthful existence. I lived in those days from Wednesday to Wednesday; for
it was not only that the drawing was an ecstasy, but that Miss Greene’s warm generous
appreciative nature was a great release and encouragement to me. ‘
Thank you for this piece on Gwen Raverat. It makes me want to read Period Piece again and to introduce younger relatives to it who I think would love it. I had no knowledge of her life as an adult and artist and am so glad to learn more about her. Thank you.