Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 - 2000), is another Somerville College alumna, most famous for her 1979 Booker Prize winning novel Offshore. This bromide print was taken in 1999, and hangs in the National Portrait Gallery (© Jillian Edelstein / Camera Press). Fitzgerald was the niece of Persephone author Winifred Peck, and in the Times Literary Supplement in 1985 she stated: "if I could have back one of the many Winifred Peck titles I once possessed I would choose House-Bound" (Persephone Book No. 72), for which she wrote the preface. Penelope Fitzgerald began her literary career aged 58 with the publication of a biography of the Pre-Raphelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. She was included in a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945", printed by The Times in 2008.

Marghanita Laski was born in 1915 and read English at Somerville College after working in fashion. This 1968 photograph of her is at the National Portrait Gallery (© Estate of Jorge Lewinski). Laski was a novelist, journalist and radio panellist. She contributed thousands of entries to the Oxford English Dictionary. Some of the BBC broadcasts in which she was involved in the 1950s and '60s are available to view here; four of her novels, including the wonderful Little Boy Lost, can be found on our website.

This picture of Margaret Kennedy was taken by Alexander Bassano and hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Kennedy was a celebrated novelist and playwright and is best known for her 1924 novel The Constant Nymph, of which there are two film adaptations. The novel was supposedly inspired by painter Augustus John's family. Margaret Kennedy's life and work features in Susan J. Leonardi's book about earlier Somerville writers, Dangerous by Degrees.

Winifred Holtby met Vera Brittain at Somerville College. After an antagonistic beginning, the two women eventually became friends and lived together on Doughty Street (where there is now a blue plaque), just around the corner from the shop. Holtby interrupted her degree to join the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps in 1918 but resumed her studies at Oxford thereafter. Holtby was a novelist, feminist, socialist and social reformer. Her best-known novel South Riding was recently adapted by the BBC. Her 1924 novel The Crowded Street about a young woman trying to escape the limitations of provincial life is Persephone Book No. 76. 

From Paris to Oxford this week. Here is a picture of the library loggia at Somerville College after it was converted into a hospital for convalescing soldiers during the First World War. Somerville was established as a women's college in 1879 and its alumnae include Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margaret Kennedy, all of whom went up between 1912-19. Vera Brittain volunteered as a V.A.D. nurse in 1915 and did not work in the library hospital but would have been familiar with scenes like this. Her memoir Testament of Youth is a powerful and honest account of the losses she endured during WWI. Read a review of it by Diana Athill here; Testament of Youth is firmly among the fifty books we wish we had published.

In yesterday's photograph this painting can be seen on the wall to Gertrude's right. It is Cezanne's The Artist's Wife in an Armchair 1867, normally in the Buhrle Collection, Zurich.  Persephone readers might be tempted to mutter the word Greenbanks on looking at this painting; but anyone reading or listening to If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso here will realise that the words Dorothy Whipple and Gertrude Stein are a total oxymoron.

So here are Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, with whom she lived after the rift with Leo, in another room in the rue de Fleurus in 1921. And here are some recordings of Gertrude reading and talking. The photograph is by Man Ray and is © Collection du Centre Pompidou.

The paintings are sublime of course. But visitors to the exhibition have to keep an  appalling and upsetting fact at the forefront of their mind: that although Leo Stein has been called 'arguably the greatest collector of early modern art in the C20th' (in a very good New York Times review by Andrea Barnet of the 1996 book about Leo and Gertrude, Sister Brother by Brenda Wineapple) and built up the Stein collection between 1903 and 1914: after the rupture between the two of them and the dispersal of the collection, they never spoke again. It is really impossible to look at these incredible paintings without feeling unutterably depressed about that fact. Especially as some of us have very, very mixed feelings about Gertrude's importance as a writer. As Andrea Barnet puts it: 'History, of course, has a way of sorting things out. Leo Stein would be remembered, in the words of Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, as ''possibly the most discerning connoisseur of 20th-century painting in the world.'' Gertrude, Ms. Wineapple writes, would become ''one of the most well-known literary personages people hadn't read.'' Leo bought Matisse's Femme au chapeau (normally at the San Francisco Moma but temporarily in Paris) in 1905.

Gertrude and Leo lived together in the rue de Fleurus from 1903-14. A 1968 article in the New York Times (written at the time the collection was being sold and dispersed; some of it has been reassembled for this exhibition) commented in a pre-Midnight in Paris fashion: 'On a typical Saturday evening, 60 years ago, one would have found Gertrude Stein at her post in the atelier, garbed in brown corduroy, sitting in a high-backed Renaissance chair, her legs dangling, next to the big cast-iron stove that heated the chilly room.' Here is some more background to the Stein collection.

The Steins in the Courtyard at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris c. 1905: Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso...L'Aventure des Stein, a sell-out exhibition in Paris, is on at the Grand Palais for one more week (having been been in America as The Steins Collect); it is about Leo, Allan and Gertrude, and Michael and his wife Sarah, and their extraordinary instinct for buying modern art. Here is an American video, and here is the French one (click on the text next to the black and white photograph).

The Post in fact comes from Paris this week, from the Marais, and despite the joys of the city, the weather (sunny and mild), the clothes, the food, the books – it is impossible not to be continually reminded of what was happening 70 years ago. So the final plaque commemorates Charles Coward, who helped to rescue hundreds of prisoners while he was interned at Auschwitz. This is a photograph of him giving evidence at Nuremberg in 1947. And this is the plaque on his house at 133 Chichester Road, Edmonton.

Eric Ravilious lived at 48 Upper Mall, Chiswick from 1931-5. The Stork at Hammersmith  (1932) 'depicts the view from the north side of the Thames east towards Hammersmith Bridge' (page 157 Lived in London) © Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne/Bridgeman Art Library.

Rosalind Franklin was hardly older than Katherine Mansfield when she died. Her plaque is  at Donovan Court, Drayton Gardens, South Kensington, where she lived from 1951 until her death in 1958.

 

William Roberts lived at 14 St Mark's Crescent in Primrose Hill. After his son died in 1995 efforts were made to preserve the house in the same way as Charleston has been preserved; it so much deserved saving, but London house prices were by then so high this proved impossible. However, there is a William Roberts Society, and here is a superbly insightful, delicate and informative talk about the Roberts house by Pauline Paucker. Also, at the end of the talk there is a 'video tour' (on youtube) of the house (it's fourteen minutes long, but Persephone Post readers will not want to miss a single second; it gives an extraordinary impression of exactly how the house was).

Blue plaques this week, taken from the English Heritage book Lived in London that we sell in the shop. In July 1918 Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry moved to 'The Elephant' (so called on account of its greyness and size) at what was then 2 Portland Villas and is now 17 East Heath Road overlooking the Heath. Katherine only lived here for a few months: because of her health she went abroad and died in France on 9th January 1923.

After yesterday's marathon (all the boxes collected by 3.30) we can concentrate on royalty statements, a January special offer (in a week or two), getting the April books to the printer... And then starting on the October books and the 2013 diary (hundreds of people asked about a diary for 2012.  Last year's was meant to be a one-off but by 'popular demand' we shall be doing one for next year). Meanwhile some of us are off to Paris to read, eat, slump on sofas – and occasionally take gentle walks inspired by David Gentleman's Paris. The painting above has never been reproduced before and was kindly sent to us by the artist's daughter a few weeks ago. It is by Sir James Gunn, who painted the portrait on the front of our Classic edition of Someone at a Distance, and he did it when he was 18 ie in 1911.

Today we are busy sending out copies of the reprint of Still Missing, 1500 of them, which is the number of people who ordered it from other bookshops after the Radio 4 broadcast. We made the decision not to supply Gardners with all the copies they wanted but to hold enough back for our readers, and luckily we never ran out. After the packing up of the boxes, and their collection by our two stalwart courier companies, we hope to slump in armchairs as per this Samuel John Peploe painting (more likely the slumping will be postponed until the weekend). Blue and White Teapot 1917 is at Kirkcaldy, which coincidentally is where Marjory Fleming lived until her death at the age of 8 on 19th December 1811 – it would be the perfect New Year read. Nb Samuel John Peploe was related to DE Stevenson by marriage – he was her husband's uncle.

A Rex Whistler drawing, undated (but don't blame the work experience girl, it may not have been dated in the original Quarterly): an image of calm and freedom and domesticity to bear in mind as we take down the decorations and festoon the house with drying sheets. When the tree has been removed from the shop window, we are going to display the (so far) seventeen translations of Persephone books – in languages ranging from French to Czech to Chinese. It would be more – most publishers make their bread and butter from translation rights – but we were a bit slow to realise that anyone would want to publish our books in other languages. Miss Buncle in German anyone? Miss Pettigrew in Korean? It's slightly unbelievable. And we now have the lovely Mary Esdaile who sells translation rights for us, so there are lots more to come.

Today the shop is open as usual. Despite yesterday's wonderful sunshine over London, we all feel a bit like this: 'Winter', a wood engraving scanned in from a ten-year-old Persephone Quarterly by one of our staunch work experience girls. Happy New Year to all Persephone readers!

Posy Simmonds (who lives not far from the shop) very kindly allowed us to use this in a Persephone Quarterly a few years ago (it first appeared in the Guardian in 1979). If you click, it will enlarge – and is guaranteed to bring a smile to the face of any harassed mother. Here are some more cartoons to make you laugh.