Is Period Piece trivial?

It is certainly surprising that a book published more than 75 years ago, an autobiographical account of growing up in Cambridge, should still be in print. But Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece is not a typical autobiography. It continues to sell because of its charming touch. It is a book that seems disarmingly slight. The author’s light-hearted, self-deprecating tone obscures some serious messages that are conveyed – perhaps so much so that many readers are happily diverted into not noticing if it has any serious point at all. Perhaps it’s only possible to realise the subtle power of this book when you read the rather heavy-handed judgement on it by more modern critics. Mary Beard, for example, in the London Review of Books (19 September 2002), is very dismissive. She quotes admiringly Simon Raven’s review of the first edition, describing Raverat’s “minor Proustian skill”. Worst of all, she looks down on it as (the shame of it!) a local title: “the book … in Cambridge, at least, still sells briskly to locals and tourists alike”). Although the book continues to sell, Beard makes it clear that “the book is more bought than read”. There is a certain sneering tone in Oxford and Cambridge Universities that dismisses any work that attempts to be popular. According to Beard, Period Piece

certainly trades on the archly self-proclaimed nostalgia of its title, and on the wry vista it offers onto a lost world, through the childhood recollections of an elderly woman … three hundred pages of memoirs that are largely devoted to the sanitised minutiae of a privileged Victorian childhood. 

 That’s precisely it! Anything other than high culture is condemned. In reading Raverat’s memoir, we are aware of the vast transformation of the aristocratic world in which she grew up, and how much it had changed by the time Raverat described her upbringing. In other words, it is a very knowing memoir. For some reason I cannot fathom, Beard condemns Raverat for writing the book when old, and even for not making a better marriage: “Gwen married Jacques Raverat, middle-ranking artist and one of her neo-Pagan friends”. Clearly, then, not a good choice. One of the great successes of the book is the remarkably vivid pen and ink drawings illustrating the scenes she describes. They have a charm and an immediacy of Ardizzone or Edward Bawden. You could describe Raverat’s art (although I would not) as middle-ranking, or small-scale, or even (heaven help us) lowbrow. It is not mentioned in this review, yet it provided a way for Raverat to express herself vividly and with immediacy.

My reading of the book is very different. This book is indeed a period piece, a remarkable piece of social history that represents the best type of history: giving a greater awareness of the sheer strangeness of Cambridge. How could such a tiny institution, such a hothouse atmosphere, be responsible for most of the thought leaders and actual leaders of the Britain of its day? Is it possible that such elitism still persists, in quite fundamental ways, so that even though women are admitted to the exclusive club, the hegemony largely remains intact?
What are Beard’s criticisms of the book?

1. Its "faux-naivety." I think Raverat knows exactly what she is doing in this book; what you condemn as an adult you accept as a child, and whatever the age at which Raverat wrote the book, she captures wonderfully some of the fears and dreams of a young girl. 
2.  "Self-serving censorship and selectivity" – Beard claims that by leaving out details such as the death of her governess from cancer, Raverat can concentrate on her “litany of more trivial domestic disasters”. For me, one of the most chilling aspects of the book was the social upheaval and class struggle taking place all around Raverat’s privileged upbringing. 
3.  Beard claims the book gets lost in detail, “for all its promised glimpse of mythical Cambridge”. Beard claims that Period Piece is part of the myth-making, that Raverat was “an old lady who may not be most fairly remembered for her part in the mythology of Cambridge croquet mallets, dreary domesticity and early bedtimes”. This is a bit like claiming Jane Austen is responsible for the vast numbers of costume drama escapists who escape to a never-never land that is not actually part of her novels at all. 
4.  Its “cloyingly sentimental perspective on the sun and strawberries of late Victorian privilege, unmitigated … by much interest in social justice.” On the contrary, this book revealed more about the reality of Cambridge than any number of undergraduate and staff memoirs. For the most part, Cambridge memoirs miss out on the everyday. 
5. Weirdly, Period Piece is condemned apparently because the people described are no longer famous: “its complex cast of late Victorian characters who – like Richard Jebb – have long since ceased to be household names, if indeed they ever were”. You should read the memoirs of pop-star groupies if you are seeking this sort of thing. Beard then goes on to quote approvingly some of the eccentricities in the male members of the family noted by Raverat. But it’s simply not true that the eccentricities were only male. Raverat describes her own mother, incapable of cooking yet convinced that she is in charge of the household, rationing the soap in such a regimented fashion that the domestic staff quietly subverted her authority by keeping stocks of essential items available from alternative locations. 

As Beard herself notes, the book describes in chilling detail, without overt criticism, the emptiness of women’s everyday lives. Her description of a shopping expedition to London is astonishing, if only for the unbelievable wealth displayed by her mother and family. If ever a book inspired me to promote female education, this is it. One of the successes of Period Piece, somewhat like Little House on the Prairie, is the restricted world view. Laura Ingalls Wilder writes, we realise as adults, with breath-taking naivety about the rights of white settlers to take native American land. Nonetheless, there is a vividness about Wilder and Raverat that is compelling. We cannot justify their social attitudes, but they are described with such chilling perfection that the effect is way more powerful than any lecture theatre. I would have every Cambridge undergraduate read Period Piece before meekly accepting the ludicrous late Victorian practices that persist at Cambridge colleges today, perpetuating an obsolete social order and elitism. Cambridge has changed far less than Ms Beard seems to suggest. The dismissal of, and blindness towards, the city of Cambridge remains breath-taking.

In her quiet and understated way, Raverat writes a more chilling condemnation of Cambridge privilege than any number of social tracts. Not so much Period Piece as A Tract for our Times. Without any male assertion of grand themes and major theories, Raverat strikes a blow for a female consciousness. Those little line drawings speak volumes. For me, one of the book’s great achievements is to celebrate a woman’s life that should have been systematically trivialised and ignored by the male-centred elitism of late nineteenth-century Cambridge. All possible steps were taken to prevent women studying, succeeding, becoming in any way memorable in the Cambridge of her childhood. Yet in this book Raverat makes her own unconsidered, irrelevant childhood something to celebrate. She has transformed her mundane upbringing through her words and pictures. She is remembered - while hundreds of male Cambridge professors who lived at the same time are not.