Women & Secrets, 1928

‘Women & Secrets’ (1928) is one of Tirzah Garwood's most accomplished early wood engravings and forms a companion piece to ‘Cat into Wife’, both drawing inspiration from the fables of Jean de La Fontaine. The engraving takes its subject from ‘The Women and the Secret’, a cautionary tale that explores the impossibility of keeping secrets and the consequences of revealing—or concealing—them. Garwood uses the familiar moral narrative not simply to illustrate La Fontaine's text, but to examine the complexities of human relationships with characteristic wit and psychological insight.

Produced while Garwood was still a student at the Eastbourne School of Art, ‘Women & Secrets’ demonstrates the extraordinary assurance of her early work. Her command of the demanding medium of wood engraving is matched by a distinctive visual language that combines crisp linear precision with subtle observation of gesture and expression. As in many of her engravings from this period, humour is balanced with an undercurrent of ambiguity, encouraging the viewer to look beyond the apparent simplicity of the scene.

‘Women & Secrets’ reveals Garwood's fascination with literary fables as vehicles for exploring human behaviour. Rather than treating La Fontaine's stories as straightforward moral lessons, she reimagines them as sophisticated studies of social interaction, exposing the tensions between appearance and reality, discretion and disclosure, and public convention and private emotion. These themes would become recurring concerns throughout her work.

Although long overshadowed by the reputation of her husband, Eric Ravilious, Garwood is now recognised as one of the most original British printmakers of her generation. ‘Women & Secrets’ exemplifies the qualities that distinguish her early engravings: technical brilliance, satirical intelligence and an acute sensitivity to the complexities of everyday life.