Enchanted Wood

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.

• ContentsIntroduction: Enchanted Wood, Enchanting WordsVignette: "TRUTH is to bend to nothing, but all to her."1. Green Worlds in Black and White: Women Artists, Rural Lives, Urban PublishersVignette: "figures delineated with all the fidelity and animation I was able to impart"2. "A Happy Heritage": Children's Poetry Books and Prestige PublishingVignette: "the overflowings of an active, wild disposition"3. The Fine Art of Mass Reproduction: Clare Leighton, Victor Gollancz, and the Radical CountrysideVignette: "my Wild Goose chase"4. Joan Hassall's Saltire Chapbooks: Discovering "A Vast New Public of Readers" in Wartime ScotlandVignette: "I inwardly bid farewell, to the whinney wilds"5. Pastorals and Petticoats: Portraits of the Artists as Young WomenAcknowledgmentsAppendix: Midcentury British Women Wood EngraversNotesBibliographyIndex

"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