Agnes Miller Parker's wood-engraved illustrations and the books that were built around them bring together materials, personalities, geographies and technologies that seem to challenge conventional understandings of modern artists’ relationships to the forces of modernity. Her 1936 Through the Woods and its 1937 sequel, Down the River, with texts by the popular regional novelist and Country Life journalist H. E. Bates, were best-sellers, confirming in the public imagination the associations of the black-and-white forms of wood engraving with rustic landscapes and natural subjects even as they were seen to ‘elevate’ into art the mass-marketed books in which they appeared. The success of these books represents the symbolic consolidation of Miller Parker's reputation as one of the best wood engravers of her generation, as well as validation of claims by art historians that the years between 1919 and 1945 ‘will be remembered above all as the great period of autographic wood engraving’. This chapter is an investigation into this generally unknown history that lies between modern art and British book illustration. It seeks to understand the curiously shifting cultural status of wood engraving as a symptom of and inspiration to the cult of the countryside that so preoccupied interwar readers, revealing how circulations between historic ‘craft’, modern reproductive print technologies and rural subjects place Parker and her art at the centre of the drama of modernity even as she tried to conduct a quiet life on Britain's rural peripheries.

This chapter builds its argument about Agnes Miller Parker's participation in and witness to rural modernity in large part out of the research and critical readings of art and print historians. Such an approach raises several questions about the everyday practices of artists and the people who write about them. Where do illustrators fit in the hierarchies and judgements of literary critics and cultural taste makers, both in the 1930s and today? How do we gauge the value and meaning of texts that ask us to read them as verbal and visual objects? Miller Parker's prints, illustrations and blocks – the material objects testifying to her years of specialised art practice – suggest answers to these questions, but they also redirect us to the materials of her life.