'Women Engraving Wood' by Pat Jaffé

Pat Jaffé, the author of Women Engravers (1990), wrote this article especially for The Persephone Quarterly.

Years ago, asked to write a book on women wood engravers, I was silly enough to think the subject ill-conceived, and almost turned the commission down.

But a quick squint from the historical angle rapidly revealed how wrong my conception was. Britain has produced many brilliant women wood engravers: Agnes Miller Parker, Gertrude Hermes, Lettice Sandford, Joan Hassall, Clare Leighton, Tirzah Ravilious. All are of the twentieth century. Before that, engraving had been a skill much in demand and highly lucrative: so men ran a closed shop, excluding women from professional training. Only when photographic methods of reproduction made engraving obsolete, did men cease their fight to keep the trade to themselves, and leave the field.

There had, of course, been women who engraved before this surrender. Most of them were born into families of skilled engravers who privately trained their daughters along with their sons and indentured apprentices: no one could monitor everything that a master craftsman did in the privacy of his own home, and many a master delivered, as his own, the work of his apprentices, of his sons and of his daughters. In this way Eliza Thompson was trained by her famous father, John, and the Taylor sisters by the two Isaacs, their father and grandfather. We know of both these traineeships through published memoirs, as indeed we know of later engraving circles set up by the wives and sisters of William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones and their friends.

There is a beguiling intimacy and intensity in wood-engraving, and it is appropriate to a domestic context. I have worked with a class of female wood-engravers in a course run at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts under the benignly sporadic tutelage of Leonard Baskin, and I know the intense pleasure of group concentration in a communal work place, individuals sitting comfortably at a bench, under a strong lamp, chatting, but concentrating with fine steel tools engraving honey-coloured boxwood blocks, and attempting to capture what Joan Hassall has characterised as that 'monumental moment' potential in each wood-engraved print.

I dared to write, in Women Engravers, that the women of the Morris circle probably delighted in their work. For this opinion I was lambasted in reviews by feminists who deplored my ignorance of Janey Morris, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Kate Faulkner and Elizabeth Burden's misery. (I suppose that that famous photograph of the Morris and Burne-Jones families, gathered in the garden of The Grange, has much to answer for: they all posed, twitchless, for a minute and a half while the exposure took its relentless time, immortalising them in the depths of uncharacteristic gloom.) Even in the late 1980s there was a reluctance among feminists to believe Georgiana Burne-Jones when she wrote, 'Oh, how happy we were, Janey and I, busy in the morning with needlework or wood-engraving'; or her account of how she and George Du Maurier's fiancée 'took counsel together about practising wood-engraving in order to reproduce the drawings of the men we loved.'

Wood-engraving did not enslave women: they enjoyed it. I know. I am a wood-engraver. It is a most absorbing technique ­ even for one whose achievements give as little self-satisfaction as mine. It is almost as though, on picking up a tool, and bending over a block, one enters a secret world. Within that world one is in control and in command: others cannot intrude. I am certain of this: I was widowed two years ago and absented myself from the rough justice of socialising with commiserators by setting myself the task of engraving a wild old tree in honour of my husband. To all enquiries I replied that I was busy and had to finish the engraving to use on a card announcing the date of Michael's Memorial Service in King's College Chapel. That engraving gave me, at a time of horrid limbo, the reassurance of having something relevant to do and of being completely in control. It was liberating. To the sculptress Gertrude Hermes, wood-engraving provided escape, steadying her nerves as well as her hand through the turmoil of the break-up of her marriage. James Hamilton described the outcome: 'After her months of isolation and unhappiness...her engravings became more expressive of her immediate personal feelings, and reflected a growing maturity and self-knowledge.'

Little wonder that bookish, talented, visual twentieth-century women have taken such delight in the intimate, intricate craft they were at last allowed to learn. A most delightful illustrative engraver, Diana Bloomfield, opened a talk about wood-engraving with the frank statement: 'I am really a grandmother and a housewife, but here and there I do my engravings. I have to spare what time I can for them and hug it to me and treasure it, because it is valuable to me, and once I start an engraving I like a good six hours in which to get down to it.' Engraving is not one of the fastest artistic processes. But, crisp and sure, you can make from the finished block thousands of identical prints. Patience has always been cracked up as a great female virtue.

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