Gwen Raverat, née Darwin, was the leading wood-engraving artist of the 20th Century. She illustrated a number of books both with her distinctive line drawings and characteristic wood-engravings, and prints from her original blocks are much sought after today. She married the French painter Jacques Raverat who died aged just 40 from MS. They were both part of the Bloomsbury Group and of Rupert Brooke’s Neo-Pagans. Their correspondence with Virginia Woolf is the subject of Clear Press’s Virginia Woolf and the Raverats. Gwen Raverat did not start writing Period Piece until she was 63.

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.

Review

"Period Piece is an altogether delightful book, a kind of insouciant wit, too apreciative to be called cynical, too unillusioned to be called pious. Mrs Raverat is not a Darwin for nothing. Her book comes out of a highly civilized background - the English professional and intellectual middle-classes, which, if not the backbone of England, may be held to be, on the whole, its mainstream of culture, and of sophisticated intelligence and wit." --The Times Literary Supplement