Enchanted Wood

Engraving a Place for Women Artists in Rural Britain

Kristin Bluemel

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN: 9781452974286
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

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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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction. Enchanted Wood, Enchanting Words
• Vignette. “TRUTH is to bend to nothing, but all to her.”
• Chapter 1: Green Worlds in Black and White: Women Artists, Rural Lives, Urban Publishers
• Vignette. “figures delineated with all the fidelity and animation I was able to impart”
• Chapter 2. A Happy Heritage: Children’s Poetry Books and Prestige Publishing
• Vignette. “the overflowings of an active, wild disposition”
• Chapter 3. The Fine Art of Mass Reproduction: Clare Leighton, Victor Gollancz, and the Radical Countryside
• Vignette. “my Wild Goose chase”
• Chapter 4. Joan Hassall’s Saltire Chapbooks: Discovering “A Vast New Public of Readers” in Wartime Scotland
• Vignette. “I inwardly bid farewell, to the whinney wilds”
• Chapter 5. Pastorals and Petticoats: Portraits of the Artists as Young Women
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Midcentury British Women Wood Engravers
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Author Biography
• Color Plates