Clemence Housman was a British wood engraver, textile artist, author, and suffragist. Born in Bromsgrove on St. Clement’s day, 23 November 1861, she was the third child and first daughter of Sarah Jane Williams (1828-1871) and Edward Housman (1831-1894), a solicitor. Her six siblings included poet and classical scholar A.E. Housman (1859-1936) and book artist, author, and suffragist Laurence Housman (1865-1959). When their mother died in 1871, she charged nine-year-old Clemence with the responsibility of caring for Laurence, who was four years younger. Clemence and Laurence became very close, sharing interests in art, literature, and political activism. After studying together at the local art school in Bromsgrove, they went to London to develop their artistic careers: Clemence took classes in wood engraving and Laurence in drawing and design (Oakley 21, 25). The siblings experienced firsthand the gender inequities that inspired their lifelong struggle for women’s rights. Clemence’s opportunity to develop an independent career only came about because the family supported her role as Laurence’s care giver. As Laurence wrote in his autobiography, “when it was decided that, to study art, I must go to London, Clemence was released from the Victorian bonds of home, for the sole reason that it was considered too risky for me to go alone without some one of more stable character to look after me” (Unexpected, 104-5). Called “Uncle Clem and Aunt Laurence” by their nephews and nieces in affectionate recognition of their non-binary identities (Engen, Housman, 28), Clemence and Laurence Housman shared a household for almost seven decades and collaborated on numerous artistic and political projects.

Clemence studied wood engraving at the City and Guilds South London Technical Arts School in Kennington and Miller’s Lane City and Guilds School in South Lambeth from 1883 to 1885. Classes for women and men were segregated, so she was not able to work alongside fellow students Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon (L. Housman, Unexpected, 107), who later went on to make wood engraving central to the aesthetics of The Dial (see General Introduction to the Dial). Their teacher, Charles Roberts (fl 1870-97), quickly discerned Clemence’s talent. After only two years of training, Clemence began working as a facsimile wood engraver in Roberts’s Chancery Lane office, cutting blocks for the Illustrated London News (1842-1989) and The Graphic (1869-1932) (Engen, Wood Engravers, 220-21). Her entry into her chosen profession coincided with her life-long activism in support of women’s rights (Timeline). In an essay for Occupations for Women Other Than Teaching, Clemence argued that the “the suitability of wood-engraving as an employment for women has not yet been fully recognized in England” because the separation of the sexes in training and the exclusion of women from apprenticeships reinforced the uneven opportunities in the workplace.

Clemence Housman’s training as a wood engraver also coincided with her career as an author. She invented her first published story, The Were-Wolf, as an oral tale to entertain the women in her wood-engraving class while they worked (Timeline). In an implicit critique of the patriarchal system of segregation in Victorian Britain, The Were-Wolf opens in medieval Scandinavia, where male and female artisans are seen working on various crafts under the supervision of the “house-mistress” in a communal hall (2). First appearing in the 1890 Christmas number of Atalanta, a girls’ magazine, Housman’s The Were-Wolf was published in book form by John Lane at The Bodley Head in 1896, with wood-engraved illustrations by the author after her brother Laurence’s designs (Timeline). Clemence’s gothic novella reveals the power of a transgressive female, the werewolf White Fell—“half masculine yet not unwomanly” (23)—to destroy the rivalry between the opposingly gendered protagonists, the hyper-masculine Sweyn and the feminized Christian. The story has often been read as a feminist exploration of the fin-de-siècle fear of powerful, autonomous women (Kooistra et al, Were-Wolf). More recently, I have used trans theory to consider how Victorian discourses of sexuality and religion inform Housman’s representation of the mythical monster, suggesting that the figure of the always-transitioning human/animal hybrid queries transgression and explores the possibilities of transformation (Kooistra, “Querying Transgression,” passim). Housman followed her gothic novella with two full-length fantasy novels, The Unknown Sea in 1898 and an Arthurian romance, The Life of Sir Aglovale de Galis, in 1905 (Timeline). When left-wing writer, poet, and activist Reginald Reynolds (1905-1958)—who had grown up with A.E. Housman’s The Shropshire Lad and knew Laurence’s books and plays well—read Clemence’s last novel, he told Laurence: “She is the greatest of the Housmans. It is the most amazing book I have ever read.” Laurence agreed with him, but said “you are one of the very few to have made this discovery” (Reynolds 208). Her last known story, “The Drawn Arrow,” was included in 31 Stories by Thirty and One Authors in 1924.

Clemence Housman had the misfortune to enter her chosen profession during the fin-de-siècle media shift from facsimile wood engraving to photographic processes of image reproduction in the illustrated press (Kooistra, “Victorian Women,” 286). By the mid 1890s, her livelihood was under threat: the new technologies brought about the collapse of London’s wood engraving industry, resulting in the closing of firms and the mass unemployment of a skilled workforce (Kooistra, “Victorian Women,” 288). Unlike most of her peers, however, Clemence was able to work in the field until she retired in the 1920s, thanks to her reputation as a highly skilled facsimile engraver and her connections to fine press publishing. 1896 was her break-out year in the belles lettres market. In addition to her woodcuts for The Were-Wolf, she engraved illustrations for Laurence’s self-illustrated poetry collection Green Arras (1896) and his experimental fairy tales, All Fellows: Seven Legends of Lower Redemption with Insets in Verse (1896). She subsequently engraved the illustrations for two of his fairy-tale books, The Field of Clover (1898) and The Blue Moon (1904), and another collection, The Little Land: With Songs from its Four Rivers (1899). Laurence dedicated The Field of Clover to “My dear Wood Engraver” and prefaced Green Arras with a dedicatory poem “To Clemence Housman,” offering his poems as a “gift” aimed at making “your name’s music be seen / Amid arras of green” (vii-viii).

Clemence Housman’s wood-engraved title-page for Laurence’s The Blue Moon (1904) was the only facsimile engraving included among the original woodcuts published in the first volume of The Venture, which Laurence co-edited in 1903 (see Introduction to The Venture). This volume was hand printed at The Pear Tree Press by James J. Guthrie (1874-1952), for whom Clemence engraved numerous illustrations in the early years of the twentieth century. “Evening Star,” her acknowledged masterpiece after Guthrie’s design, appeared in his little magazine The Elf in 1905. In an essay on Housman’s wood engravings for Print Collectors’ Quarterly in 1924, Guthrie commented that “she must have laboured much to fret out from the density of the wood the evasive spirit of trees and waters” for this image, concluding: “in technical range no engraver has carried the art further” (194, 199). Twentieth-century American print-maker Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) took Guthrie’s assessment one step further, claiming that “the special and entrancing qualities of The Pear Tree Press illustrations are in large measure due to Clemence’s sensitive and capable hand transferring Guthrie’s designs into compelling works of fine art” (np).

Housman’s virtually unrivaled skill as a facsimile wood engraver was recognized by arts-and-crafts printer Charles R. Ashbee (1863-1942), who employed her in a number of limited-edition books published at his Essex House Press. Of these, the most remarkable is perhaps her wood engraving after a design by William Strang for S.T. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1903. Housman completed her final commission in 1924, a series of twenty-four wood engravings after architectural drawings of Chipping Campden by Frederick Landseer Grigg (1876-1938), which she had begun working on during the war. Noting that these “prints show no diminishment of skill or craft,” Bernard Sleigh celebrated Clemence Housman in Wood Engraving After 1900 (1932) as “one of only a handful of engravers, and the only woman, who sustained a wood engraving career after 1890s” (44). Proofs of Housman’s “best work went by request” to the Print Room of the British Museum at about this time, and a rare engraved woodblock, accompanied by the original drawing it remediated, was acquired by the Tate Gallery (L. Housman, Unexpected, 110).

Always a passionate supporter of women’s rights, Clemence Housman sidelined her wood engraving career between 1908 and 1914 to devote her time and expertise to the suffrage cause. Leveraging her domestic sewing skills into the production of textile art, she became, according to Laurence, “chief banner-maker” to the movement (Unexpected, 190). Using the suffrage colours of white, purple, and green, Clemence created the monumental “From Prison to Citizenship” banner after Laurence’s design for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) “Women’s Sunday” march of 21 June 1908 (Timeline). “Thereafter,” as Jill Liddington writes, “it became the banner in regular demand, used by the WSPU to illustrate the 1908 Christmas card, and regularly borne in subsequent processions” (45; Tickner passim). In 1909, Clemence and Laurence Housman’s home in Kensington became host to the Suffrage Atelier, an arts-and-crafts cooperative devoted to making visual propaganda for the feminist cause and to supporting professional women artisans (Tickner 20). Although the Atelier included training in woodcuts and hand-printing for suffrage posters and postcards, Clemence Housman does not seem to have been involved in these activities; her skillset was in traditional facsimile engraving rather than modern design.

In addition to making banners and hosting workshops at the Atelier, Clemence achieved fame as a political activist in the suffrage movement. Favouring peaceful non-resistance and civil disobedience over militancy, she joined the Women’s Tax Resistance League and on 30 September 1911 became the first woman arrested and imprisoned for refusing to pay the inhabited house duty unless she had enfranchisement (Crawford, np). Clemence’s action generated excellent publicity for the cause, as the Evening Standard published a photograph of her arrest (see portrait photo above) and the Tax Resistance League organized a protest march. A woman of strong convictions, Clemence did not pay the tax owing until she finally achieved the right to vote in 1918 (Crawford). Clemence and her brother Laurence were also “pre-eminent in designing the protest” against the 1911 census (Liddington 39). In Vanishing for the Vote, Liddington devotes an entire chapter to the siblings’ boycott strategies, following Clemence’s simple maxim, “No Vote No Census” (Liddington 148; Chapt. 13, passim).

In 1924 Clemence moved with Laurence from London to Street, Somerset, where a house had been built to their design on a property adjoining that of Roger and Sarah Clark, the Quaker friends who shared their feminist and pacifist views (Crawford). The siblings lived comfortably together here for almost thirty years, before a series of strokes sent Clemence to a nursing home. She died on 6 December 1955 at Mount Avalon, Glastonbury, and was buried at Smallcombe cemetery in Bath, next to her brother Robert and sister Kate (Crawford). Near the end of her long life, Clemence offered a rare statement about her work as a wood engraver: “It’s just the give and take between human ingenuity and reluctant material,” she explained, “that makes craftsmanship so fascinating and satisfactory” (qtd in Oakley 124). A gifted facsimile wood engraver, author, and political activist, Clemence Housman carved an independent living for herself out of a reluctant patriarchal culture. The resistance of her various media—wood, words, and textiles—has ensured that her fascinating contributions to the art of the book and the art of life have endured.

©2024, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, FRSC, Emerita Professor of English and Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Digital Humanities, Toronto Metropolitan University.

Selected Wood Engraved Works by Clemence Housman

• All-Fellows: Seven Legends of Lower Redemption with Insets in Verse, by Laurence Housman. Two wood engravings after Laurence Housman’s designs. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1896.

• The Blessed Damozel, by D.G. Rossetti. End-papers, title-page, borders, and initials wood engraved by Clemence Housman and Reginald B. Lodge after designs by James J. Guthrie. Pear Tree Press, [1904].

• Chipping Campden. Twenty-four wood engravings after pen drawings by F.L. Griggs, with Introduction and Notes by Russell Alexander. Basil Blackwell, 1940.

• “Evening Star,” wood engraved after James Guthrie’s design for The Elf: A Magazine of Drawings and Writings, new series, Book 2, 1905.

• Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, by John Milton. End-papers, title-page, initials, and other decorations wood engraved by Clemence Housman and Reginald B. Lodge after designs by James J. Guthrie. Pear Tree Press, [1904].

• The Field of Clover, by Laurence Housman. Six wood engravings after Laurence Housman’s designs. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1898.

• Green Arras, by Laurence Housman. Two wood engravings after Laurence Housman’s designs. John Lane at The Bodley Head, 1896.

• The Little Land: With Songs from its Four Rivers, by Laurence Housman. Four wood engravings after Laurence Housman’s designs. Grant Richards, 1899.

• Maude, by Alfred Lord Tennyson. One wood engraving after design by Laurence Housman and Reginald Savage. Essex House Press, 1905.

• Miss Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg, by Thomas Hood. One Wood engraving after Reginald Savage’s design, Essex House Press, 1904.

• Of Aucassin and Nicolette: A Translation in Prose and Verse from the Old French, Together with Amabel and Amoris, by Laurence Housman. Four wood engraved illustrations and textual decorations by Clemence Housman after Paul Woodroffe’s designs. Chatto & Windus, 1925.

• Of the Imitation of Christ: In Four Books, by Thomas à Kempis. One wood engraving after Laurence Housman’s design. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1898.

• Prunella, or Love in a Dutch Garden, by Laurence Housman and Granville Barker. One wood engraving after Laurence Housman’s design. A.H. Bullen, 1906.

• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. One wood engraving after William Strang’s design, Essex House Press, 1903.

• The Were-Wolf, by Clemence Housman. Six wood engravings after Laurence Housman’s designs. John Lane at The Bodley Head, 1896.

Selected Works Authored by Clemence Housman

• “Conditions of Release.” Votes for Women, 27 August 1908.

• “The Drawn Arrow.” 31 Stories by Thirty and One Authors, edited by Ernest Rhys and C.A. Dawson. D. Appleton & Co., 1923, 314-326.

• The Life of Sir Aglovale de Galis. Jonathan Cape, 1905.

• The Unknown Sea. Duckworth, 1898.

• The Were-Wolf. Illustrated by Everard Hopkins. Atalanta vol. 4, no. 39, Dec. 1890, pp. 132-56.

• The Were-Wolf. With 6 illustrations by Laurence Housman wood engraved by Clemence Housman, John Lane at The Bodley Head, 1896.

• “Wood Engraving.” Occupations for Women Other Than Teaching. Printed for the Association for Assistant-Mistresses, 1887, pp. 3-5. Pamphlet in Mark Samuels Lasner’s Laurence Housman collection, 62.1, University of Delaware Library, Museums, and Press. (authorship attributed).

Selected Works about Clemence Housman

• Baskin, Leonard. “Portrait of Clemence Housman.” Icones Liborum Artifices: Being Actual Putative Fugative & Fantastical Portraits of Engravers, Illustrators & Binders. Ghenna Press, 1988.

• Crawford, Elizabeth. “Clemence Annie Housman (1861-1955).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004. Online edition.

• Engen, Rodney. Dictionary of Victorian Wood Engravers, Chadwyck-Healey, 1985.

• —. Laurence Housman, Catalpa Press, 1983.

• Guthrie, James J. “The Wood Engravings of Clemence Housman.” Print Collectors’ Quarterly, vol. 1, No. 2, 1924, pp. 190–204.

• Housman, Laurence. Materials and Notes for Autobiographical Account, Box 13, Folder 6, Laurence Housman Papers in the Seymour Addleton Collection, Bryn Mawr Library.

• —. The Unexpected Years. Jonathan Cape, 1937.

• Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. “Clemence Housman’s The Were-Wolf: Querying Transgression, Seeking Trans/Formation.” Victorian Review, vol. 44, no. 1, Spring 2019, pp. 55-67.

• —. “Victorian Women Wood Engravers: The Case of Clemence Housman.” Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s: The Victorian Period, edited by Alexis Easley, Clare Gill and Beth Rogers. Edinburgh University Press, 2019, pp. 276-300.

• Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen, et. al, eds. The Were-Wolf, by Clemence Housman. Annotated. COVE Digital Edition, 2018,
  https://editions.covecollective.org/edition/were-wolf

• Liddington, Jill. Vanishing for the Vote: Suffrage, Citizenship, and the Battle for the Census. Manchester University Press.

• Oakley, Elizabeth. Inseparable Siblings: A Portrait of Clemence and Laurence Housman. Brewin Books, 2009.

• Reynolds, Reginald. “The Third Housman.” English, vol. 10, no. 60, 1955, pp. 208-14.

• Sleigh, Bernard. Wood Engraving After 1900. Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1932.

• Tickner, Lisa. The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-14. Chatto and Windus, 1989.

• Timeline for Clemence Housman’s The Were-Wolf. Were-Wolf Digital Edition, edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra et al, COVE,
  https://editions.covecollective.org/content/timeline-clemence-housmans-were-wolf