The Women’s Wood Engraving Revival (1912-65): A Feminist History of Twentieth-Century Book Illustration (Bloomsbury Research in Illustration Series)

The Women’s Wood-Engraving Revival focuses on the lives and work of women illustrators who were instrumental in an artistic revival of wood-engraving as a book illustration technique. As a reaction to the mass-produced engravings churned out by anonymous engravers in the mid-nineteenth century, the revival sought to recapture the perceived authenticity and artistic superiority of wood engraving’s earliest instantiation, in which the artist and engraver were the same person. While bound up with the limitations of the gendered legacy of the Arts and Crafts Movement and the remnants of the Victorian era, the Wood Engraving Revival afforded women new opportunities to develop as professional artists and illustrators.Wood-engraving as a technique required few tools and was specifically suited to the needs of women artists, who required autonomy over their workspaces.Lacking independent wealth, all four women profiled in this book used wood-engraving for book and periodical publishers as a me