Betty Miller

This week: photographs of Persephone authors that you may not have seen before. Here is Betty Miller in 1935, looking simply beautiful (imbued with the 'moral charm' Isaiah Berlin remarked on) in a portrait by Bassano which is in the National Portrait Gallery. She was 25, Victor Gollancz had just turned down Farewell Leicester Square and it would not be published for another six years. Yet if it had appeared before the war, and indeed if a film had been made, it might have had a huge impact, at least on a par with Phyllis Bottome's The Mortal Storm. Fernham has written about Farewell Leicester Square here.