Gwen Raverat's House by the River
A sketch of 'Period Piece' in six chapters
My circular post for paid subscribers this week sketches Gwen Raverat’s life through six ‘mini-chapters’, beginning and ending with her house by the river.
‘This is a circular book,’ the artist Gwen Raverat, aged 62, explains at the start of her memoir Period Piece. It was her first book and she had wondered how to structure it, until she decided on the idea of thinking of it as like the wheel of a bicycle. ‘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 were attached 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 just around the corner.
