Woman's Mission: Companion of Manhood

The jet lag is abating and this idea of constructing a novel through pictures is taking hold. Woman's Mission: Companion of Manhood (at the Tate) was painted twenty-seven years before The Morning Paper. But it was a world away: the 1890s girl with the hat on is looking towards the twentieth century, whereas the woman as 'ministering angel', who might be her mother or grandmother for the purposes of our novel, is rooted in the nineteenth. (This concept of a writing a novel in a different way must have been inspired by reading Any Human Heart on the way back from LA, which is a novel disguised as autobiography – diary entries published with linking passages and an index. Cover design by Megan Wilson here.)