Gwen Raverat: friends, family and affections Frances Spalding Harvill Press, 438pp, £30 ISBN 1860467466

Gwen Raverat, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, was brought up on austere Victorian breakfasts. Every day, she and her brother and sister would be given porridge with salt and plain buttered toast, the theory being that this would strengthen their character. Just twice a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays, they would be allowed something a little stronger, "a thin layer of that dangerous luxury, Jam. But, of course, not butter too. Butter and Jam on the same bit of bread would have been and unheard-of indulgence - a disgraceful orgy." For the rest of her life, Gwen always thought of Sundays and Wednesdays as "lovely" and "dark red", on account of "these glamorous Jam-Days", though the "queer thing is that we none of us like [jam] to this very day".

This is a detail from Period Piece, Gwen's account of the eccentric mores of her childhood among Darwin's descendants, first published in 1952. A bestseller at the time, it's still a pretty near-perfect book.

The subtitle, "a Cambridge childhood", might lead you to expect something rather pompous and twee. It is not like that at all. Yes, it has picturesque drawings (by Raverat herself) of Cambridge bridges and ladies in parasols, but these things are always seen with amused comic detachment. ("Love. How ridiculous," reads the caption of a drawing of Gwen as a child, watching an anguished, lovelorn man beating his brow at the mantelpiece). As the author herself says, it is a "circular book", so it does not matter which chapter is read first. My own favourite is entitled "The five uncles", and describes in loving yet unsparing detail the five sons of Charles Darwin, including Gwen's own father ("a father is only a specialised kind of uncle anyway"). They were, she writes, "the most unself-conscious people that ever lived", but also the most hypochondriac. At Charles Darwin's funeral, Uncle William, the eldest, was sitting in the front seat at Westminster Abbey, "when he felt a draught on his already bald head; so he put his black gloves to balance on the top of his skull and sat like that all through the service with the eyes of the nation upon him."

The trouble with great memoir-writers is that they make such difficult subjects for biography. It's not Frances Spalding's fault that her new biography of Gwen Raverat isn't as good as Period Piece. It couldn't be. But it is clear and intelligent, well researched, and, for those of us who are interested, it continues the story of Gwen's life beyond her childhood. When she was 23, Gwen studied art at the Slade, where she met and later married the French painter Jacques Raverat. He was friends with Rupert Brooke and Andre Gide, and they moved on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group. Gwen and Jacques collaborated on wood engravings and frescos and had two daughters together, but their happiness was disturbed by the terrible pain and debilitation he suffered as a result of multiple sclerosis. In 1925, when she was only 40, and her daughters were five and eight, she "seized a pillow and terminated his suffering".

If she had never written Period Piece, Gwen would still be remembered as an extremely talented wood-engraver. She illustrated numerous books, from Thumbelina to Tristram Shandy (Period Piece was originally conceived as "a peg to hang illustrations on"). In her wood engravings, she liked to evoke the finger-like branches of winter trees and the feeling of riverwater. To coincide with the new biography, there is an exhibition of Raverat's work at the Broughton House Gallery in Cambridge, showing its full spectrum, ranging from the early religious art with Jacques, through her delightful French period, when she did wood engravings of market places and olive-pickers, to her later colour prints. Some of the work is on sale; you can buy your very own Raverat from as little as £80.

Many of the works in the exhibition are also reproduced in Spalding's book, which is stunningly well produced and illustrated. Among the colour plates is a self-portrait that Gwen painted in 1953, after she had suffered a stroke. It shows a sturdy face with a determined mouth, wearing a mannish clergyman's hat. We learn from Spalding that Gwen was greatly attached to this old hat. On one occasion, her daughter Elizabeth visited and said that the hat was "too horrible and greasy to wear". They bought her a new one, but Gwen refused to wear it until her housekeeper had put it on the floor and jumped on it a few times. As she comments at the end of Period Piece: "Oh dear, Oh dear, how horrid it was being young and how nice it is being old and not having to mind what people think." Unlike the other Darwins, she was not a hypochondriac. When she became really infirm, not minding what people thought, she decided to prescribe for herself the same treatment she had given her husband, and took her own life.

The Gwen Raverat exhibition will be showing at the Broughton House Gallery, 98 King Street, Cambridge CB1 (01223 314 960), from 7-28 June

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