The Clean Approach

Eric Ravilious died in 1942 but his designs continued to be used, for example for the 1953 coronation mug: this Garden Implements textile was printed by Edinburgh Weavers in 1958. Meg Andrews, the London textile historian and dealer, called it 'very rare' when she sold it, which indeed it is. The material is white cotton printed with black and would have been perfect for Gardener's Nightcap – except that Margaret Calkin James's Fritillary could not really be improved on (and we sell it by the metre in the shop).

On 6th October last year the Post had a c. 1923 photograph of the young man who, many years in the future, would enable Persephone Books to be set up. Here now is a c. 1915 photograph of the girl (she is on the left, it's her younger sister on the right) who, one day, would be equally crucial; like the young man she was born in 1907 so in this picture she is about eight. She too would leave Germany and come to England in 1933.

Christine de Pizan writing in her study © British Library. The painting is amazing, the dog unforgettable, prompting a rereading of Flush. And Virginia Woolf has been much on our minds: on Monday it was seventy years since she died.

Garden fete 2010 by Francis Farmar. Nowhere but England.

The Morning Paper 1890 by SIr James Guthrie. The first page of a novel maybe.

Come to think of it, we could have a rather good week of Posts which are visual representations of the first five chapters of a novel. LA jet lag has a put a stop to that for this week but we'll work on it. Meanwhile: the girl reading the paper has her hat on and is obviously about to go out. Many late C19th houses had this William Morris paper in the hall.

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.)

Still on the theme of pictures as novels: Tea Time by FW Elwell (1870-1958) is in the new Persephone Biannually which is being sent out on Monday. We have used it to illustrate Miss Buncle Married, Persephone Book No. 91. Elwell is such a fascinating painter: what seems to be happening is that the woman on the right is making a point (emphasised by her right hand) and the woman on the left is rather shrinking away from what she is saying (you can feel her distaste in the way she is leaning back in her chair); the woman in the middle is not quite sure of her reaction and her hand is held up as if to say, now I'm not sure about this.

Second thoughts about yesterday's post, in the light of the discussion at the Book Group on Wednesday (is Hetty Dorval about gossip or was she amoral?): whether the woman in the middle isn't joining in avidly... And something completely different today. How can so many weeks have gone by without our having had a Shell poster (and isn't it months since we had a bentwood chair)? This is Graham Sutherland 1932. There will be another Shell poster in the new Persephone Biannually next week..

An exhibition of twentieth century women war artists has opened at the Imperial War Museum. This is Women's Canteen at Phoenix Works in Bradford 1918 © IWM by Flora Lion, a well-established painter who was commissioned to record factory scenes of the home front. A painting like this, which most of us will never have seen before, and has presumably been in store in the IWM vaults, arouses all kinds of tetchy feelings about the canon: it's just as 'good' a painting as anything we are meant to gaze at reverentially in public galleries, better some would say. And yet had we been allowed to see it – because had we heard of Flora Lion? Almost certainly we had not. And could this have anything to do with the fact that she was a woman? Questions of the canon have been much on our minds in the last few days because of going to see Cause Celebre, our third Terence Rattigan play in a year. And yet after 1956 and Look Back in Anger he was incredibly depressed because his work was virtually shunned. Parallels anyone? Think Dorothy Whipple. Shunned at exactly the same time. Slower to get back into the public consciousness because a) a woman who did not live a rackety life b) like Rattigan, was very keen on narrative/story/ keeping people on the edge of their seat, whatever you like to call it (Rattigan is the only playwright where even after a long day in the office one never, ever wants to shut one's eyes even for five minutes).

An Army Tailor and and an ATS Tailoress 1943 in the IWM exhibition. It is by Evelyn Dunbar who featured on the Post on September 21st last year (Land Girls 1941), whose Fish Queue is on the front of the Classic Good Evening, Mrs Craven, and about whom there has been an excellent book by Gill Clarke. Evelyn Dunbar was the greatest female war artist of the Second World War yet, alas, her work is still considered minor. Gill Clarke writes: 'The fact that Evelyn Dunbar did not seek publicity, was modest about her achievements and did not see herself as part of a clique has contributed to the neglect of her work.' We seem to have heard that somewhere before.

There are lots of other amazing paintings at the IWM exhibition but it's Evelyn Dunbar who remains closest to our heart. Here is Women's Land Army Hostel 1943 © Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum. It is painful reading in the Gill Clarke about the establishment's muted enthusiasm for paintings like these: it thought they did not express 'war consciousness', that they lacked 'war-substance', and Kenneth Clark wrote that 'the trouble about war pictures of agriculture is that they are rather hard to distinguish from peace pictures.' All absolute nonsense of course. The young women in this painting would not be there if it wasn't for the war, and by growing food they were doing vital war work; to argue that this isn't a 'war painting' because no one is fighting is absurd – and relevant to many of Persephone's novels, books like Good Evening Mrs Craven and A House in the Country being imbued with awareness of this theme. (This painting is on page 122 of Gill Clarke's book but I have not been able to discover where the original is.)

Today our kind envelope stuffers (minus hats) spend the day sending the new Biannually to the 4000 'foreigns' (cf, Facebook). Whereas Kenneth Clark may not have considered knitting to be 'war work', most women rightly thought they were making a contribution to the war effort. A Knitting Party 1940 © IWM is on page 104 of Gill Clarke's book. If it seems familiar it's because it was in the Biannually four years ago when House-Bound was published. The caption read: 'Evelyn Dunbar was commissioned by the War Artists Advisory committee and was the only salaried artist painting women's activities on the home front. "Rose had spent the afternoon at a Red Cross working-party" we are told on page 50 of House-Bound, "and Rose would sit there knitting..." on page 258.'

Evelyn Dunbar's Convalescent nurses making camouflage nets © IWM was in the Persephone Quarterly, as it then was, in the winter of 2003. It was taken from War through Artists' Eyes by Eric Newton 1944. It was also in War pictures by British artists: Women 1943. Here Laura Knight observed that the grim necessities of war had further enlarged the opportunities for women's work 'in spheres formerly considered foreign to their sex' and concluded, 'After what she has done in this titanic struggle, will she not guard what she has gained, and to Man's efforts add her own? If she can do what she has done in the war, what may she not do in peace?' (Although a 1940s reader might have slightly resented the implication that in the 1930s women sat around doing nothing. But we know what she meant.) Even the convalescent nurses were expected to work, which in this case meant threading coloured strips of fabric into nets designed to conceal military equipment and buildings from aerial bombardment. It was tedious, awkward, dusty yet important work. (All this from p 105 of Gill Clarke's book).

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.

Emma Smith in the spring of 1944, second from the right, on the canal boat she wrote about in Maiden's Trip. Two years later she would go to India with a documentary film unit, and then spend a year in Paris writing The Far Cry, which came out in 1949 when she was still only 26. In 1951 she was runner-up in the Observer short story competition when it was won by Muriel Spark; this was the competition that Diana Athill won in 1958. When she came and spoke at a lunch in the shop, Diana told us about going to the Observer and being asked if she would like to see the other entrants to the prize. A door was opened and an entire room was stacked with typescripts (two thousand of them): she has never forgotten the sight of all that paper and the glorious feeling that her story had been chosen out of all of them. It was very very bad luck for Emma Smith that Muriel Spark submitted a story her year; she is a remarkable writer (The Far Cry has been one of our bestsellers, entirely by word of mouth) and winning the competition would have been a huge boost, as it was for Diana.

E M Delafield in the 1920s © Life magazine. Copyright laws are a mystery. EMD is still in copyright here (although comes out in three years) but Consequences is apparently public domain in America so someone has scanned in our edition and it is available on Project Gutenberg. We cannot imagine any Persephone reader choosing to read the extraordinary Consequences on screen rather than spending a mere ten pounds on one of our books but it seems more 'up front' to mention it. Someone rings nearly every day to ask when our books will be available electronically and we reply neither in the negative nor affirmative ie. the response is - one day. Faber have started doing this for other publishers under the cleverly named Faber Factory umbrella. Maybe the time has come for us to walk round to Great Russell Street and talk to them. Or should we just say: no, for the moment Persephone books are grey with endpapers on beautiful Munken Pure paper in legible Baskerville type and that's how it's going to be.

Edward Panter-Downes, Mollie's father - the photograph of her by Lee Miller (scroll down) was taken during the war. Scroll down also for two paragraphs about Mollie (after all the poignant detail about her father's death in the First World War); the first mentions The Shoreless Sea, the astonishingly mature novel Mollie wrote when she was only 16. This is definitely on our long list, as is London War Notes, please write in (or come to Possibly Persephone? on May 25th) if you have an opinion (we have a photocopy of The Shoreless Sea which we could lend anyone interested). And in any case, PhD writers where are you?

Marghanita Laski on 13 June 1934 when she was 18 and at the end of her first year at Oxford (presumably acting Cleopatra in an OUDS production). The Observer used this photograph when Rachel Cooke chose The Victorian Chaise-longue and The Blank Wall as two of the ten best neglected literary classics here.

Self-portraits of women painters this week – a short week because of Easter Monday and Royal Wedding Friday (where the weather forecast is rain and we are royalist enough at Persephone Books to mind about this). Here is Lydia Field Emmet (1866-1952) painted by herself in 1912, and here is a video with a selection of her paintings.

Self-portrait in Bedroom c. 1930 by Audrey Weber, whose dates are unknown but she painted between 1917 and 1950; it comes up for sale at Paul Liss in a couple of weeks.

Another painting from the Gloucestershire and Wiltshire volume: First Lady Mayor of Wilton Edith Oliver (1872-1948) by Rex Whistler. Edith Olivier is nowadays best-known for being Rex Whistler's closest friend, but she was indeed Mayor, and a novelist. This painting is at Wilton Town Council. Can someone write and tell us if it is on view (in the council chamber perhaps)?

Today it's Derbyshire p.145, Désire Leroy and Julie Palmyre Van Marcke-Robert Still Life, Fruit and Flowers 1866 Royal Crown Derby Museum Trust. It is clear from this and this that both women were professional painters. And wonderful gardeners. Inspired by Diana Athill, who grows blue morning glory from seed every year, we are trying our best, but the seedlings that flourished indoors in pots are unfortunately not doing so well in the garden. (Sixty or seventy years later Vanessa Bell also did a wonderful flower painting, which Jane Brocket has put up here in a clever and imaginative post that imagines herself doing a grand tour.)

The Tyne & Wear Museums volume: The Three Brothers, the Sons of Thomas Dallas attributed to George Watson (1767-1837) is at Shipley Art Gallery which, according to the PCF, 'has one of the finest provincial collections of Dutch and Flemish sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings in the UK' as well as some fine Victorian paintings and watercolours, prints and drawings, sculpture and decorative art. For us southerners the realisation of what glories are held in a museum like the Shipley – that we have never seen – is sobering indeed.

And this is William Marlow (1740-1813) View of Ludgate Street from Ludgate Hill, with the West Front of St Paul's Cathedral, London which, The City of London PCF volume tells us, is at the Bank of England (this has apparently 'accumulated a sizeable collection of oil paintings through bequests, gifts, commissions or purchase'). A look at this photograph shows that in a way things haven't changed much: St Paul's is still there, and the curve of the street. Our favourite tea place, Bea's of Bloomsbury, has recently opened a branch nearby.

Another week of PCF volumes, but of course these pictures are only the tip of the iceberg: there are thousands and thousands of other wonderful paintings within the thirty-five or so volumes (so far). Here is a detail from Ken Howard's Billingsgate Market 1962, also taken from the The City of London volume.

Portrait of a Woman 1931 by Arnold Mason (1885-1963) is at the Newark and Sherwood Museum Service (p. 240 of the Nottinghamshire volume) – so perfect for a Persephone Classic, maybe we should do some more.

Somerset p62, the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath (where there will be a Persephone walk on June 16th). This is Gainsborough The Byam Family painted in the mid-1760s.

And finally from the PCF volumes, two pictures from Northumberland, Tees Valley & Tyne and Wear: this is Still Life with Bowl, Spoon and Apples 1913 by Mark Gertler and it's at the Hatton Gallery. This couple of weeks of exploring the PCF in detail has made us - well, not exactly indignant because the Foundation itself is doing an amazing thing, but thoughtful and concerned and a tad bewildered. In exactly the same way that thousands of extraordinary books disappear, so thousands of amazing paintings are hidden, forgotten, locked away, overlooked, whatever you like to call it. There would be a case for insisting by law that there were two or three museums spread over the UK that had changing exhibitions drawn from all the public galleries up and down the country; or there would at least be a case for insisting that the galleries themselves had to display the work on a rotating basis rather than leaving it in a basement. This is obviously a subject about which art historians know a huge amount and we at Persephone Books are mere beginners. But the PCF provokes a lot of hard thinking.

Again from the Northumberland volume: Norman Stansfield Cornish b 1919 Self Portrait in Northumbria University Gallery. This would have been perfect for Little Boy Lost, except we love the picture we have so much. One effect of this PCF fortnight (do look at their website, it has just launched another exciting initiative) has been to make us want to publish more Classics; or at least to use these amazing paintings in one way or another. Of course we can put them on the front of the PB. But that is only twice a year and in any case this autumn we will have a black and white photograph of suffragettes (to accompany our suffragette novel). We'll definitely have more PCF paintings inside the PB. And perhaps we should do more cards. Or simply postcards. But really we are a book publisher! Well, it's a happy dilemma. And meanwhile we urge you to get some of the volumes, which are incredibly good value, or at least browse their website; and to go to the hundreds of provincial galleries of course. Persephone Books' next trip is to Penzance, to the Penlee House Gallery and Museum in a week's time, where we shall be on Saturday June 4th after giving a talk at the amazing Morrab Library; Penlee House is home to the Newylyn School paintings and in particular to Harold Harvey's, some of which have featured on the Post during the last two years – and may feature again the week after next!

So after two weeks of oil paintings, the Persephone Post returns to the kitchen and we shall have a week of domestic objects. Here is a chair designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1903. It has been imitated countless times yet the original has an inimitable quality and is quite unlike any other chair in the world. It is also a classic in the sense that you could imagine anyone in any of our books sitting on it, male, female, affluent, less well off, it would suit every household.

A plate designed by Clare Leighton in 1952. Her book Four Hedges in back in print in a beautifully produced edition using the illustration on the front that we have always used to accompany Mariana. Clare Leighton's work should be much better known: it is a pity that most people only know her as the sister of Roland Leighton, immortalised in Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth. This plate, which was designed in America (where Clare Leighton went to live in 1939), was manufactured by Wedgwood and is for sale here for £100. Apparently the organisation Support Historic New England has a set of all twelve plates. (Someone should write to them about supporting Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who deserves far more attention than she gets in America, or even New England, well I'm afraid she gets hardly any. A mystery: The Home-Maker is one of the great books of the twentieth century.)

This iconic photograph was in a Persephone Quarterly a few years ago. Even while the Blitz continues, the family has a tablecloth and the vegetables are in a dish not just plonked on the table in a saucepan. With a magnifying glass you can see that the large dish by the father is potatoes and the mother is carving a joint of meat, anyway doing something on one of those large blue and white plates that used to be ubiquitous. The caption is: 'Families Must Eat. After the raids on the East End there was n panic exodus; people preferred to cling to what was left and help neighbours who had suffered most. The woman on the left and the girl on the right lived in the ruined house across the road. Dinner was cooked over a fire made gipsy-fashion in the basement.' Now, a caveat, this may have been a set-up for propaganda purposes. Nevertheless. You'll find it on page 68 of the 1942 booklet Frontline, amazingly enough copies are available on abe at a rather reasonable price even though this is a very rare book and an extraordinary contemporary record. Perhaps we need to be shaken out of our complacent June summeriness the week after next (next week being Harold Harvey) and have more of the Frontline photographs. Just in case we should forget what was happening in London seventy years ago.

The Persephone Post has mentioned Ben Pentreath before, because his shop is round the corner in Rugby Street and we often send people there, telling them, rather gushingly that his is the best shop ever. Now it's the weekend-away season, present-finding time is upon us and this shop can always be relied on. There is something magical about pink lustreware – any kitchen is transformed (on the daffodil-in-a-milkbottle principle ie. a depressing room is always improved if you tidy up and have some flowers in any kind of vase) by a beautiful jug with flowers. At this time of year, in England, it would be roses. This jug is £35, although I am not going to risk it on the train to Cornwall.

So there was only one Harold Harvey on display at Penlee House, the others are presumably in store, but here is one you might be lucky enough to catch on another occasion – Laura and Paul Jewill Hill 1915.

So there was only one Harold Harvey on display at Penlee House, the others are presumably in store, but here is one you might be lucky enough to catch on another occasion – Laura and Paul Jewill Hill 1915.

It used to be difficult to see Harold Harvey's paintings (and still is difficult to see the real thing) but now there are various websites devoted to him (this one is in Russian curiously enough and this one publicises the book about him, Harold Harvey: Painter of Cornwall 2001). My Kitchen 1923 © Oldham Art Gallery is, like several of Harold Harvey's other paintings, uncomfortable from a 21st century perspective because of the relationship between 'mistress' and 'servant'. And very few of us would contemplate cooking a lobster, for all kinds of reasons (cf. the scene in the excellent film about a family holiday on Tresco, Archipelago).

The same stripy sheet, although in a paler blue, can be seen in A Kitchen Interior 1918 © Brighton and Hove Museum and Art Gallery (if this painting seems familiar it's because it was on the front of the Persephone Biannually No. 6). The sheet is hanging from a Sheila Maid clothes airer: no home should be without one, they are available here in the UK and will soon be available from Ancient Industries. I'd say this was also 'the artist's wife' and if the girl on the right is helping her, she looks very relaxed and bien dans sa peau – unlike the older woman in the white, nun-like dress five years later, who has an unfortunate Mrs Danvers quality - definitely prefer the atmosphere of this painting to the lobster one!

The Leisure Hour - Portrait of the Artist's Wife Gertrude reading 1917 is not in the 2001 book about Harold Harvey and is in fact for sale at Richard Green, which compares it with Hammershoi ('although this comfortable scene has none of Hammershoi's melancholy'). But looking at it, and the other Harvey paintings on this week's Post, makes one think first of Vermeer. (Someone wrote to Dorothy Whipple once comparing her at length to Vermeer, and whether or not this is justified, certainly each Harold Harvey painting could have inspired a Dorothy Whipple novel or short story.) An hour of 'leisure' (nicely old-fashioned word). A dress in Persephone grey! A comfortable chair with a cushion for her head. Yellow walls. White flowers (?roses). The only flicker of unease comes from the painting's date - right in the middle of WW1 - and for this reason most modern viewers would imbue it with a touch of melancholy.

Stanley Spencer's The Sisters 1940 © Leeds City Art Galleries, oil painting 48" x 30". It was commissioned by the Kitamura sisters but apparently never delivered, cf. the Keith Bell catalogue. The poet Robin Ford wrote rather a good poem about them in 2003 which is here.

The Behrend Family 1927 oil on canvas by Henry Lamb (1885-1960) © Royal Pavilion Libraries and Museums, Brighton and Hove/Bridgeman Art Library. In 1923 Stanley Spencer stayed in Dorset with Henry Lamb, who wrote: 'Stanley sits at a table all day evolving acres of Salonica and Bristol war compositions': just as he was beginning to think of raising a subscription among his friends and patrons to allow him to paint these pictures on a large scale, the Behrends visited Henry Lamb in Dorset, saw Stanley Spencer's work and first had the idea of commissioning the chapel as a memorial to Mary Behrend's brother Lieutenant Sandham.

While he was painting at the Sandham Chapel Stanley Spencer lived in the village. Cottages at Burghclere © The Estate of Stanley Spencer was painted between 1927 and 1930. It was bought by the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge in 1930 but at the moment is in an exhibition at Compton Verney called 'Stanley Spencer and the English Garden'; it's on until October 2nd and there is a book of the same name to accompany the exhibition.

Another National Trust property which we had never managed to get to before, this time the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, Hampshire. 'Stanley Spencer's most famous work and arguably his greatest achievement' can be seen in a small chapel built by the Behrend family to commemorate Henry Willoughby Sandham (d. 1919). Any lingering grumbles about the Trust vanished: the Chapel is beautifully looked after, completely unspoilt and the curator inside was unobtrusive and helpful. And the garden was an unmown meadow and there was a sweet collection of plants outside. 'Tea in the Hospital Ward' 1932 is on the righthand side as you come in. More detail here.