Sun and Strawberries

Mary Beard

• Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections by Frances Spalding
  Harvill, 438 pp, £30.00, June 2001, ISBN 1 86046 746 6

‘The ghosts we deserve’ was the Listener’s headline for Simon Raven’s review of Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece in December 1952. Most reviewers had gushed with sentimental enthusiasm for these memoirs of a late Victorian academic childhood in Cambridge, so helping to make them one of the most ‘unlikely bestsellers’ of the later 20th century (the book has never been out of print and in Cambridge, at least, still sells briskly to locals and tourists alike). Rose Macaulay, for example, oozed – anonymously – in the TLS: ‘an altogether delightful book . . . an enchanting cast of characters, all set forth with a kind of gay, insouciant wit . . . the humour is infectious, the figures endearingly ridiculous and admirable human beings.’ ‘A happy book that will give pleasure to thousands,’ chimed in Mervyn Horder in the Spectator, with a prediction that was, if anything, too modest (already by 1975 it had sold more than 120,000 copies in the UK alone). Against this chorus of admiration, Raven raised some sharper questions.