Gwen Raverat - Raverat, Cambridge and Period Piece

Raverat, Cambridge and Period Piece

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 1928 she moved into the Old Rectory, Harlton, near Cambridge. The house was the model for her engravings for The Runaway. 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 life revolved around her contacts in Cambridge. One aspect was her work for the theatre, designing costumes, scenery and programmes. Her first experience was in 1908, when she designed costumes for Milton's Comus at the New Theatre, Cambridge. Her brother-in-law Geoffrey Keynes asked her to provide scenery and costumes for a proposed ballet drawn from William Blake's 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. The miniature stage set that she built as a model still exists, housed at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. She went on to design costumes, scenery and programmes for some ten productions, mostly for the Cambridge University Musical Society.

Raverat had a keen interest in children's fiction. Three of her books were Victorian stories that she convinced publishers to reprint - The Runaway, The Bird Talisman and Countess Kate. When she discovered that The Runaway had gone out of print, she convinced the publisher Duckworth to reissue it in 1953. Frances Spalding has written an illuminating article about this aspect of Raverat's life in the Guardian.

When she was 62 she started to write her classic childhood memoir Period Piece, which she illustrated with line drawings. It appeared in 1952 and has not been out of print since then.