period piece

Period Piece by Gwen Raverat (Norton, 1953)

a young Gwen Raverat

Another book that had been on my shelf for many years that I have never read, and I’m very glad I finally did.  I bought it because it was mentioned in a book about books that were lost/forgotten/unheralded.  

Gwen Raverat was Charles Darwin’s granddaughter, and Period Piece is a memoir of her childhood in Victorian England.  Her father, one of Darwin’s five sons, married Maud du Prey, an American heiress, and they settled in Cambridge along with many other Darwins.  Despite the strictures of Victorian society , Gwen, the eldest child, grew up in a warm, loving, and slightly unconventional home.  Her memoir, written when she was in her 60s and published in the 1950s, is divided into independent chapters, each one addressing a different topic or aspect of family life. Raverat provides her own naive drawings for this book.  She is a natural writer: perceptive, smart, funny, self-deprecating.  Period Piece is a lovely, charming book — a portrait of a golden and privileged childhood spent in the bosom of a large extended family of loving and lovable human beings.