Furlongs 1934 by Eric Ravilious. This was the house just west of Firle Beacon in Sussex that the artist Peggy Angus rented from 1933 until the early 1990s. It is now Listed Grade II. And still has much of the atmosphere it had during all the years Peggy lived and worked here, when her many friends visited. More of them during the next few days.

And for the end of the working week something completely different (except that for the last few days the Post has had more of a male focus than usual). This is a detail from Bernini's famous Pluto and Proserpina/Persephone 1621 in the Borghese Gallery in Rome.

This is Nabokov's handwriting, it appears in The Original of Laura. A very tenuous link with yesterday and the day before, but an excuse to put up a novelist's handwriting, which is always interesting (most literary biographers consult a graphologist).

So thanks to Nadia and Rhona (both long-standing Persephone readers) who emailed yesterday: Ludwig Baumer (d. 1928, a year after Schad painted him) was a notable WW1 war poet, ' I vividly remember reading his Dammerung in Graben and it's heartbreaking. I re-read it this afternoon and it's even more so now.' He was part of the writers and artists colony at Worpswede and had an affair with Martha Vogeler, wife of its leader Heinrich Vogeler, a communist who eventually emigrated to Soviet Russia and died there during the war. He had been evacuated from Moscow to Kazakhstan and went to the same place to which Anna Akhmatova was evacuated. Hence this famous 1914 portrait of her by Nathan Altman. It's in the Russian Museum in St Petersburg (where you can go to her flat).

We have a reproduction of Sonja by Christian Schad (1894-1982) hanging in the office, it was on the Post in August '09. This is Ludwig Baumer 1927. He was a poet, 'a leading advocate of proletarian liberation' (according to the Guggenheim website) and definitely a character in Manja. Is there anyone reading this who knows more about him?

Totally random things on the Post this week. Harold Knight (1874-1961) painted the girl on the front of our Classic edition of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding (scroll to the bottom of the page). Morning Sun (in a private collection) is earlier, 1913. Since yet again the weather forecast in London is 'white cloud', this painting is to remind London Persephone readers that one day soon, in only a few weeks, we shall be sitting beside open windows with the sun dappling the leaves. Lucky Los Angeles, where part of my heart is because younger daughter lives there: it's 75 degrees, sunny and clear.

The last Thomas Lawrence this week: the then Foreign Secretary (later Prime Minister), George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen (1784-1860) painted in 1829 just before Lawrence died in January 1830. Robert Peel commissioned the painting and thought it 'the finest in the world'. Everyone who saw it admired its grace and simplicity. Rather like a Jane Austen novel in fact.

Rosamund Hester Elizabeth Croker Pennell (1810-1906) married George Barrow when she was 22 and was later Lady Barrow. A favourite of George IV, she was rumoured to have been kissed by three kings. This Thomas Lawrence portrait is now in Buffalo, at the Albright-Knox Gallery. She was evidently a great pin-up (unsurprisingly) as the portrait was painted in 1827, when she was 17, and a year later Samuel Cousins did a famous black and white print based on it – which still be bought at the National Portrait Gallery. (There is something slightly odd about her bosom, but hey...) Here is an extraordinary interview with 'The Beautiful Miss Croker' when she was 96 (scroll down to the bottom).

Eliza and Mary Davidson, a portrait exhibited at Dulwich Picture Gallery for a 2007 exhibition called British Children's Portraits and their Influence in Europe.

This extraordinary portrait, painted between 1793 and 1796, was begun just after Robert Banks Jenkinson, later Prime Minister as the 2nd Earl of Liverpool (1770-1828), delivered his maiden speech. Jackie Wullschlager, writing about the exhibition in the Financial Times, describes 'the ambitious orator, new to the House of Commons, lean, lanky, he swaggers towards us with a direct, smouldering stare, his towering posture and sense of purpose accentuated by props of a classical column, an upright quill and a red drape propelling the black-suited figure into the light – confrontational, mesmerising.'

The exhibition of Thomas Lawrence's portraits at the National Portrait Gallery closes this Sunday January 23rd and we cannot resist having five of them on the Post this week, even though the link to twentieth century women writers ('parallel in pictures' is after all our shout line) is a little tenuous. But think fiction, think insight and understanding, think artistic perfection. And think Jane Austen: this portrait of Isabella Wolff was painted between 1803 and 1815, which is exactly the years Jane Austen was writing her novels. Thomas Lawrence was 34 in 1803 when he began painting Isabella (who separated from her husband, the Danish consul, in 1810); she was probably his lover, certainly they were close friends. 'The elaborate background may refer to the gallery of plaster casts after antique sculptures at Isabella's home in Battersea...She is examining a book with an illustration of the Delphic Sibyl from the Sistine Chapel' (exhibition catalogue).

Well, the time has come finally to wrench ourselves back from Ortigia to Bloomsbury. The reaction to the last ten days of posts has been such that any Persephone reader inspired to go to Sicily might think of waving a grey book about and there's a good chance there'll be someone else doing the same: the Duomo piazza or the Apollo cafe (overlooking the Temple of Apollo) can be the scene of an informal reading group. Here is a typical Ortigia street as a reluctant farewell (the photograph is by Francesco Bonacorso). Final point: if one had never read any Persephone books, which of them would be good to take to Ortigia? Every Eye, Bricks and Mortar, Operation Heartbreak, Lady Rose and Mrs Memmary, Flush and Amours de Voyage all have an Italian connection.

Unusually, there is a freshwater pond, the Fountain of Arethusa, right beside the sea. Here Nelson's sailors loaded barrels of fresh water to take with them on the voyage that ended with the Battle of the Nile in early August 1798.

The doorway of the house/mansion/palace where Nelson stayed, now some lucky people have apartments in it.

Nelson stayed here in 1798, and again in 1800 when he was given the keys to the city. Inside there is the most beautiful courtyard. (The house can be seen very small on the left in the picture for 4 January.)

It's Sicily again this week, because a small part of our heart has stayed there. This is entirely appropriate: Persephone was carried down into the underworld at the Fonte Ciane, a pool of clear water surrounded by papyrus groves to which we looked across from our hotel room (or would have done if binoculars had been to hand). We were at the Grand, one of the oldest hotels on Ortigia, full of old-fashioned charm, very good value out of season and not as posh as it looks in this photograph: highly recommended, apart from breakfast, for which we decamped to the Cafe Apollo. There will be more about Persephone and Sicily in the next Persephone Biannually (this, by the way, is being sent out a little earlier than usual because of Easter and the Royal Wedding ie the week of April 11th).

And Ortigia has a spectacular Greek theatre. You can almost hear the crowds, it is as if they had only just departed, laughing, talking, going home to supper.

More from the Palazzo Bellomo: Annunciation by Antonello da Messina 1430-79, thought to have been painted in 1474. (The marks on the left are where some of the paint has peeled away.)

So as well as the sea, lemon and orange trees heavy with fruit, and Ortigia itself, there is a wonderful museum, the Galleria Regionale di Palazzo Bellomo, that was reopened recently after a five-year restoration programme. It has amazing fifteenth-century statues which are not hidden behind glass but are most beautifully displayed because they are not displayed – they just stand casually in the middle of the room. Here is the Madonna and Child by Domenico Gagini (1449-92).

A fortnight away, and a 'two centre' holiday – Leipzig in thick snow (Bach, opera, a ballet based on the life of Charlie Chaplin, a day in Dresden) and then Sicily in warm sunshine, where we seemed to spend most of the second week sitting in Ortigia's stunning Piazza Duomo.