Cat into Wife, 1928

Tirzah Garwood's ‘Cat into Wife’ (1928) is one of her most compelling early wood engravings and is widely regarded as an unusually personal and psychologically sophisticated work from this period. The engraving is based on Jean de La Fontaine's fable ‘The Cat Metamorphosed into a Woman’, in which a man, devoted to his cat, has her magically transformed into a woman so that he can marry her. Yet despite her human appearance, she cannot suppress her feline instincts: at the sight of a mouse, she instinctively gives chase, revealing that her essential nature remains unchanged. Garwood transforms this familiar moral tale into something altogether more personal.

According to the work's provenance and modern scholarship, the cat-woman is understood to be a self-portrait, while the seated figure represents her future husband, Eric Ravilious. Rather than illustrating La Fontaine's fable literally, Garwood employs it as an allegory for identity, love and marriage. The engraving is not only a witty self-caricature but also a meditation on courtship, female identity, and the expectations placed upon women entering marriage.

Garwood was just twenty years old when she produced this remarkable engraving, shortly after completing her studies at the Eastbourne School of Art. At the time, her relationship with Ravilious was developing, though they would not marry until 1930. Viewed in this context, the work has often been interpreted as expressing ambivalence about marriage. The transformation from independent "cat" to "wife" is at once humorous and unsettling, suggesting an anxiety over whether marriage demands a fundamental change in a woman's nature—or whether such a transformation is merely superficial.

Cat into Wife was not an isolated experiment. Around the same period Garwood also produced ‘Women & Secrets’ (1928), another wood engraving inspired by a La Fontaine fable, which also belongs in the RAW collection. Together, these works reveal her fascination with literary narratives that illuminate human behaviour through wit, irony and animal metaphor.

For decades Garwood's achievements were overshadowed by Eric Ravilious's posthumous reputation. More recent exhibitions and scholarship—most notably the retrospective Beyond Ravilious—have firmly re-established her as one of the most original British printmakers of the late 1920s. ‘Cat into Wife’ is now widely recognised as an early masterpiece, combining exceptional technical accomplishment with a richly layered psychological narrative.