Kate Greenaway : A Biography

Macdonald, London, first edition, 1981. Cloth, small 4to,. 240 pp, numerous ills. From the blurb: "Most people think of Kate Greenaway as a style rather than as a person. Her name evokes idealised yet saucy children, dressed in a consciously old-fashioned manner, posed with care as though for a classical frieze and painted in delicate pastel colours. Looking at her work now it seems the quintessence of Victorian innocence as respectable Victorians wished to see it.Yet, behind this charming, though stylised work was its creator, the real Kate Greenaway - an ambitious, vulnerable, emotionally tormented woman. Her poignant, often tragic story is told here in full for the first time in this, the first authorised biography for over seventy-five years. Born in 1846 in London's East End, the daughter of a skilled wood engraver, Kate was, from the first, a child of strong, sometimes morbid feelings, a deeply sensitive solitary to whom daydreams and the romantic - even the bloodthirsty - spelled disillusionment with the real world. Instead of seeking fulfilment in that world she tended to seek escape within herself, an escape first given a local habitation and a name" during childhood visits to relatives in the English countryside. Throughout her whole artistic life it was this countryside and its folklore that sustained her. Moreover, in meeting the man who above all others symbolised to the Victorians these very attitudes, she entered on the great, obsessive passion of her life. That her love for the author, critic and prophet, John Ruskin, was almost certainly unconsummated is, in a strange way, almost irrelevant to the story of their poignant, turbulent romance, for Ruskin had, from the first, been given complete control, jealously supervising and dominating Kate Greenaway's life and work. Her unstinting devotion to him grew and endured, surviving even the fits of madness that plagued this great, self-tormented genius, a man dominated both by the sincerest devotion to art - and an obsession for just the sort of Greenaway girls Kate created. This strange relationship lies at the heart of Kate Greenaway's life and art, and makes a compelling story containing elements of comedy, pathos, tragedy and heartbreak. Rodney Engen has worked for over five years on researching this biography, using much unpublished correspondence (including over 1,000 love letters and the family papers) and interviews with surviving friends and relations. He has also uncovered many unpublished illustrations which appear here for the first time. His tone is frank, telling the story without false reverence but with a genuine perception of the extraordinary character of one of the Victorian era's most popular artists. The book is illustrated throughout in colour and black-and-white, and an annotated list of Greenaway books is included for collectors and serious students of her work. Near Very Good, top edge slightly duststained, in a used and price-clipped dustwrapper.