The Runaway - Softcover

'One reason why wood-engraving makes such a good medium for books,' writes Frances Spalding in her Afterword to the new Persephone Books edition of The Runaway, ' is that it can be locked in the chase with the type and printed in one fell swoop. Cut in to the end grain of the wood, it is necessarily a severe and disciplined medium, and is also very satisfactory in the way that the taut, crisp results, with their sparkling interplay of blacks and whites, can balance the weight and density of the text. Gwen Raverat exploits this cleverly in The Runaway: her designs punctuate each new chapter with headings; infiltrate single figures every time a new character is introduced; occasionally slice unexpectedly at an angle across the page, or unfold in a double-page spread...Text and illustrations transmute this charming, lively tale into a small work of art.'
The author of The Runaway was a Victorian writer and cousin of Lewis Carroll's who published poetry, novels and children's books. But this is her 'most completely successful book,' wrote the critic Roger Lancelyn Green, ' because of its admirable plot which is a brilliant and undeservedly forgotten foretaste of the understanding of childhood which was so near.' And Anne Harvey has also written an Afterword to the 'engaging, moving and funny' Runaway, telling us something about the elusive Mrs Hart - elusive because, although she wrote many novels and collections of poetry, very little has so far been discovered about her life.
The novel is about a girl named Clarice who lives in a 'charming home, at a convenient (railway) distance from the city, where her father repaired every morning, returning to a late dinner. Clarice had no mother and no sisters.' One day she discovers Olga, a girl of her own age who has run away from school, crouched in the shrubbery and agrees to hide her in her bedroom. The subsequent plot is delightful rather than dramatic, for the joy of The Runaway is the way its style and tone pays tribute to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (which had appeared seven years before) and anticipates E.Nesbit. 'It's girls that are kept under and kept down,' says Olga; 'and so there's nothing left for girls but to run away, just as I did; and it would be hard to blame a poor creature for that.'