Gwen Raverat

Darwin College, Cambridge, occupies both her childhood home, Newnham Grange, and the neighbouring Old Granary where she lived from 1946 until her death.

Campbell Dodgson, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, wrote about her in his introduction to the book: Mr. Greenwood excels in the delicate and minute work in white line upon black, which has also won the admiration of many collectors for the earlier wood engravings of Mrs.

He printed four more books for Raverat – Mountains and Molehills by Frances Cornford (1934), Four Tales from Hans Andersen, a new version by R. P. Keigwin (1935), The Runaway by Elizabeth A. Hart (1936) and The Bird Talisman by H. A. Wedgwood (her great-uncle) (1939).

Raverat spent a year producing 29 wood engravings for an edition of Les Amours de Daphne et Chloe by Longus.

She illustrated a number of books with line drawings, including Over The Garden Wall by Eleanor Farjeon (1933), Mustard, Pepper and Salt by Alison Uttley (1938), Red-Letter Holiday by Virginia Pye (1940), Crossings by Walter de la Mare (1942), Countess Kate by Charlotte M. Yonge (1948) and The Bedside Barsetshire by L. O. Tingay (1949).

[7] Raverat played a significant part in the wood engraving revival in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century.

[4] Her name recurs consistently in all contemporary reviews, and the first book devoted to a modern wood engraver was Herbert Furst's Gwendolen Raverat.

[10] Examples of her work were included in ‘Print and Prejudice: Women Printmakers, 1700-1930’, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, 2022–23.

[11] Apart from her studies at the Slade and the period from 1915 to 1928, which covered her life with Jacques and early widowhood, Raverat lived in or near Cambridge.

In 1946 she moved into The Old Granary, Silver Street, in Cambridge; the house was at the end of the garden of Newnham Grange, where she was born.

Her brother-in-law Geoffrey Keynes asked her to provide scenery and costumes for a proposed ballet drawn from Illustrations of the Book of Job to commemorate the centennial of Blake's death; her second cousin, Ralph Vaughan Williams, wrote the music to the work which became known as Job, a masque for dancing, the premiere of which took place in Cambridge in 1931.

Raverat met one of her close friends Elisabeth Vellacott, in the society's production of Handel's oratorio "Jephta".

Three of her books were Victorian stories that she persuaded publishers to reprint – The Runaway, The Bird Talisman and Countess Kate.

Raverat's grandson, William Pryor, has edited and published the complete correspondence between Gwen, Jacques, and Virginia Woolf.