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

Talk outline

Amid the austerities of depression-era publishing in Britain, women artists and urban editors recognised a unique opportunity to make and sell popular books illustrated with wood engravings. In this talk, Kristin Bluemel will focus on four of these artists – Gwen Raverat, Agnes Miller Parker, Clare Leighton and Joan Hassall – weaving together accounts of their lives and work and sharing images from their books to tell a compelling and little-known story about a modern art that transformed the lives of both urban and rural women and changed the way we see the visual and literary landscapes of modern Britain.

Highlighting illustrations from her recently published book, Enchanted Wood: Engraving a Place for Women Artists in Rural Britain, Kristin will show how women artists used wood engraving to redraw professional and personal boundaries for themselves and other women. Depicting realistic scenes of country life, their 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. Discussing white-line engravings, pen and ink drawings and rare colour engravings from these four artists’ books for children and adults, Kristin reveals the magnified power and meaning of gentle arts for everyday people and for national patterns of work and play.

Speaker Biography

Kristin Bluemel (Kris) is Professor of English and Wayne D. McMurray and Helen Bennett Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Monmouth University in New Jersey, USA. She has been researching, speaking, Thomas Bewick. In addition to authoring Enchanted Wood: Engraving a Place for Women Artists in Rural Britain (University of Minnesota Press, 2025, with assistance from the Leonard A. Lauder Research for Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), she is the co-editor with Michael McCluskey of Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), editor of Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain (Edinburgh UP, 2009), author of a study on the political renegade George Orwell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and another on the experimental modernist Dorothy Richardson (University of Georgia Press, 1997).

Event format

13.00: Welcome and talk start

13.40: Talk finishes

13.40-14.00: Q&A

Please note that a light lunch and refreshments are provided at the event.

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✖ Livestreamed

✖ Recorded

✖ BSL

✖ Live captioning

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Image caption: Joan Hassall, Bewick’s most devoted acolyte among the four women wood engravers featured in this book, enchanted readers of all ages with this extraordinary little wood engraving of the moment “the fairy cam again, and telt her to put on the coat o’ feathers o’ a’ the birds of the air, an’ gang to the kirk. . .” From Rashie Coat, Saltire Society Chapbook No. 12, Edinburgh: Saltire Society, 1951, p. 6. 2 7/8 x 1 5/8 inches. Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Joan Hassall/Simon Lawrence.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Paul Mellon Centre, 16 Bedford Square, London, United Kingdom

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