Gwendoline Mary "Gwen" Raverat (Cambridge, August 26, 1885 - February 11, 1957) was an English wood engraver and art painters. She is the co-founder of the Society of Wood Engravers in England. Her girl name was Gwen Darwin. Lifecycle
Gwen Darwin was the daughter of the English astronaut and mathematician George Howard Darwin and Maud du Puy. She was the granddaughter of biologist Charles Darwin. She married the French painter Jacques Raverat in 1911 and lived until Jacques died of multiple sclerosis in southern France in 1925 in Vence near Nice. They received two daughters: Elisabeth (1916), married to Norwegian politician Edvard Hambro, and Sophie (1919) who married Marguerite Mark Pryor.
She has illustrated some books with drawings and wood engravings. Prior to their relocation to France, both were active in a group around Rupert Brooke called the Neo Pagans, and in the Bloomsburg group, which included Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell and Lytton Strachey.
Gwen Raverat's brother, Geoffrey Keynes, asked her in 1927 to make decorative designs for a ballet made for William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job, on the occasion of Blake's 100th Death Day. Her pursuit Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote the music for the ballet, known as Job, a masque for dancing. The decor can still be seen as a miniature model at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
She eventually returned to Cambridge where she wrote her memoirs in 1952 under the title Period Piece. In 2004, the complete correspondence between Gwen, Jacques and Virginia Woolf was published, edited by grandson William Pryor, entitled Virginia Woolf and the Raverats.
The Darwin College in Cambridge includes both the home where she grew up and the adjacent Old Granary (old grain warehouse) where she lived in the last years of her life. One of the student houses of Darwin College was named after Gwen Raverat. Picture of the house in Cambridge where she grew up (now part of Darwin College) Publications and Literature
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