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PDF Download Period Piece: a Cambridge Childhood PERIOD PIECE: A CAMBRIDGE CHILDHOOD PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Gwen Raverat | 288 pages | 20 Jun 1974 | FABER & FABER | 9780571067428 | English | London, United Kingdom Period Piece: a Cambridge Childhood | Gwen Raverat Pre-owned Pre-owned. Last one Free shipping. See all 5 - All listings for this product. No ratings or reviews yet No ratings or reviews yet. Be the first to write a review. Best Selling in Nonfiction See all. Bill o'Reilly's Killing Ser. When Women Pray Hardcover T. Jakes Christian Inspirational No ratings or reviews yet. The author's father was Sir George Darwin. Her father had a large extended family. Charles and Emma had seven children who survived to adulthood - four uncles and two aunts to Gwen. All bar one of the uncles and aunts were married, and two uncles had children, resulting in five cousins:. Note: Florence Henrietta Darwin , Frank's third wife is briefly mentioned but the marriage was after the time period in the book. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The author's mother's Maud du Puy's family tree, adapted from the tree in the book. NB: Maud's siblings are missing. The author's quite extensive family tree. The author is in yellow. Period Piece. We were very, very old and we knew all about everything; but we often forgot our age and omniscience and played the fool like anyone else. I remember lying on the sofa between the dining-room windows with the peacock-blue serge curtains, and wishing passionately that I could have been Mrs. Of course, I should have liked still more to be Mrs. Rembrandt, but that seemed too tremendous even to imagine; whereas it did not seem impossibly outrageous to think of myself as Mrs. She was English enough, and homely enough, anyhow. Surely, I thought, if I cooked his roast beef beautifully and mended his clothes and minded the children—surely he would, just sometimes, let me draw and engrave a little tailpiece for him. Only just to be allowed to invent a little picture sometimes. O happy, happy Mrs. In The Origins of the English Imagination, Peter Ackroyd writes: If that Englishness in [his] music can be encapsulated in words at all, those words would probably be: ostensibly familiar and commonplace, yet deep and mystical as well as lyrical, melodic, melancholic, and nostalgic, yet timeless. Small though they are, her best prints and there are many are finely tempered expressions of a love of humanity and its landscape. Simon Brett writes in his postscript to the Silent Books edition of the catalogue raisonee of her work: The regard she turned upon reality — upon landscape, figures in landscape, sometimes the incidents of story — sees all things together. Her vision is to do with seeing that is not as obvious as it sounds. In this primacy of seeing, interpretation, expression, storytelling or imagination are gathered up into statement: this is how it is. The ease with which the figures lie, at one with their being and the world around them, thereby stands comparison with the etchings of Rembrandt that were her childhood pillow-book, or with the idylls of Titian or Seurat. Brett is echoing a point Gwen made herself. She wrote of wood engraving that it was. It is the looking, the seeing that matters. William: William Carlos Williams, when explaining his poetics, said that there are no ideas but in things. They say it will simply break his heart if he is told that he is too bad to hope to make anything of it. That was an axiom. And by us I mean, not only the children, but all the uncles and aunts who belonged there. Of course all the flowers that grew at Down were beautiful; and different from all other flowers. Everything there was different. And better. For instance, the path in front of the veranda was made of large round water-worn pebbles, from some sea beach. They were not loose, but stuck down tight in moss and sand, and were black and shiny, as if they had been polished. I adored those pebbles. I mean literally, adored; worshipped. This passion made me feel quite sick sometimes. And it was adoration that I felt for the foxgloves at Down, and for the stiff red clay out of the Sandwalk clay-pit; and for the beautiful white paint on the nursery floor. This kind of feeling hits you in the stomach, and in the ends of your fingers, and it is probably the most important thing in life. 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. Of course, there were things to worship everywhere. I can remember feeling quite desperate with love for the blisters in the dark red paint on the nursery window-sills at Cambridge, but at Down there were more things to worship than anywhere else in the world. William : By Jacques had been diagnosed with Disseminated Sclerosis as MS was then known and they were advised to move to the South of France for his health. Though they knew, without outwardly acknowledging it, that he was dying, their creativity was at its height. It was then that their relationship with Virginia Woolf burgeoned in an extraordinary exchange of letters. In one to my grandfather, not long before his death, Virginia wrote this extraordinary paragraph that has become totemic for me: Is your art as chaotic as ours? I expect you got through your discoveries sometime earlier. In , stressed with looking after two small girls my mother and aunt and her dying husband Jacques, Gwen still felt it a matter of life and death to not lose hold of her creative process, her way of transcending the ordinary. She wrote to her cousin Nora Barlow: Anne : [It is] a matter of life and death to keep going at [my wood engraving] as much as I can and not lose hold. In October she wrote to Richard de la Mare son of the poet Walter at Faber and Faber: Anne : I have long been playing with the idea of writing a sort of autobiography as a peg to hang illustrations on; and I am now taking the liberty of sending you a scrap out of it not the beginning nor yet the end to see if you think it would do to publish someday with lots of pictures. I am afraid that what I have written may be too flippant and rather odious, and I would like to know what some outside Literary person feels about it. The idea of the book is not to be a continuous autobiography, but a series of separate chapters called Sport, Religion, Art, Relations, etc. She wrote to Walter that she conceived of the book… Anne : …as a social document — to be 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. William : By the autumn of , when Gwen was 66, she had finished the text and most of the drawings for Period Piece ironically she preferred drawings to wood-engravings for her own book, for their immediacy. But later that same year she had a massive stroke that paralysed her down her left side. Nevertheless the book was published on 10 October at one guinea. It was an immediate success. Letters of praise poured in and reviews were enthusiastic. It seems a lifetime since I came with Virginia to see you in Caroline Place… I want to say with what pleasure and admiration I have read your book and also what enormous pleasure it would have given Virginia. William : Period Piece has become one of those books that builds itself a favoured niche in the subconscious of everyone who reads it. It has been in print from Faber — albeit in editions of ever-decreasing print quality — for 61 years now. Period Piece has many qualities, not least, for members of the Darwin-Wedgwood clan, acting as a needed deflator of pretension. In her chapter on Down House, Gwen wrote: Anne : The faint flavour of the ghost of my grandfather hung in a friendly way about the whole place, house, garden and all. Of course, we always felt embarrassed if our grandfather were mentioned, just as we did if God were spoken of. In fact, he was obviously in the same category as God and Father Christmas. Only, with our grandfather, we also felt, modestly, that we ought to disclaim any virtue of our own in having produced him. I should really send you a large bill, for buying copies for people has nearly ruined me this Christmas — and I gather must have nearly ruined many people, judging by the way the copies in the bookshops melt away. Period Piece (book) - Wikipedia Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Period Piece. Jul 06, Paul rated it liked it Shelves: autobiography. This is a memoir of a Cambridge childhood in the s and early s. Gwen Raverat was an artist and wood engraver and also a granddaughter of Charles Darwin. All the art work in the book is done by Raverat. The memoir is themed, so each chapter covers a different topic: Education, propriety, childhood fears, religion, clothes, uncles and aunts, th This is a memoir of a Cambridge childhood in the s and early s. For instance, that first day, they were all singing: 'I am the Honeysuckle, You are the Bee.
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