Enchanted Wood: Engraving a Place for Women Artists in Rural Britain

How women wood engravers helped reshape the visual and literary landscape of modern Britain

Amid the austerities of Depression-era publishing in Britain, urban editors and women artists recognized a unique opportunity to make and sell popular books illustrated with wood engravings. Enchanted Wood focuses on four of these artists--Gwen Raverat, Agnes Miller Parker, Clare Leighton, and Joan Hassall--weaving together their lives and work to tell a compelling and little-known story about a modern art that transformed the lives of both urban and rural women.

In this richly illustrated book, Kristin Bluemel demonstrates how women engravers used wood engraving to redraw professional and personal boundaries for themselves and other women. Depicting realistic scenes of country life, these illustrations are reminiscent of the aesthetic of eighteenth-century artist, naturalist, and print innovator Thomas Bewick even as they present distinctly modern reflections on gender, age, marriage, and motherhood. Reproducing and analyzing white-line engravings, pen and ink drawings, and rare color engravings from these four artists’ books for children and adults, Enchanted Wood reveals the magnified power and meaning of gentle arts for everyday people and for national patterns of work and play.

Integrating vignettes from Bewick’s natural history with formal, thematic, and cultural analysis of the women’s art as she recovers their medium, oeuvres, and stories, Bluemel shows how wood engraving led Raverat, Miller Parker, Leighton, and Hassall to achieve professional stature, public affirmation, and personal independence. A visually rich history of collective achievement, Enchanted Wood establishes these women engravers as important modern artists and literary figures in their own right.

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Kristin Bluemel is professor of English and the Wayne D. McMurray and Helen Bennett Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Monmouth University. She is author of George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics: Intermodernism in Literary London; editor of Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain; and coeditor of Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention. Her research for Enchanted Wood was supported by a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at Newcastle University and a Publication Grant of The Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.