Enchanted Wood

Engraving a Place for Women Artists in Rural Britain

Kristin Bluemel

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Paperback

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English

University of Minnesota Press
23 December 2025

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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By: Kristin Bluemel
Imprint: University of Minnesota Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 19mm
Weight: 340g
ISBN: 9781517914776
ISBN 10: 1517914779
Pages: 296
Publication Date: 23 December 2025
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

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.

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

""Beguiling and creative, Enchanted Wood brings to the fore the importance of key twentieth-century wood engravers, all emerging in admirable detail as artists distinct in their backgrounds, sensibilities, and outputs. Kristin Bluemel's meditations on rurality, gender, and revival are illuminating, creating a powerful account of female artistic vocation.""--Hannah Field, author of Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader ""Enchanted Wood is a multilayered feminist study of the brilliant and captivating work of four women wood engravers. Blending technical insight with cultural history, it reveals how their enchanting illustrations shaped twentieth-century British literary culture and provides fascinating insights into how these artists built their careers as professional illustrators and created images that still have the power to influence how we imagine the countryside today.""--Rosemary Shirley, author of Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture