Abstract
Socialist artist, wood engraver, and writer Clare Leighton transformed the interwar wood engraving revival from a niche movement within fine book publishing into an everyday art for the people when in 1935 she brought out with leftist publisher Victor Gollancz her authored and illustrated Four Hedges: A Gardener's Chronicle. Read alongside Country Matters (1937), a second illustrated countryside book that Gollancz commissioned from Leighton, Four Hedges becomes a key 1930s text because it realigns modernist values associated with the wood engraved productions of small presses with the more democratic values of mass-reproduced trade books. Combining feminist biography, close reading, and modernist and middlebrow book history, this article argues that the wood engraved books that Gollancz commissioned from Leighton contribute to rather than resist or exist outside of the radical 1930s once they are located within Leighton's rural arts practice and Gollancz's publishing ventures, including his publication of George Orwell's legendary urban documentary, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).
Published Version
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