The church at Moreton in Dorset is very very small but has something incredible: the windows were etched by Laurence Whistler (Rex's brother). Moreton is absolutely vaut le detour because of these windows, which are doubly beautiful because you look through the etched glass at the trees and grass beyond.

Unfortunately there can be little doubt that the maid has just cleared the table after lunch (has she left port in a decanter maybe and is the elder boy drinking coffee?) and is waiting the other side of the open door. But then the mother is barely in the picture. A blogger thinks the painting 'shows a dysfunctional group with the father of the family presiding conceitedly over the rest'. But this is how it was in 1907 (and could he just be ill at ease?). A Bloomsbury Family by William Orpen © National Galleries of Scotland shows the artist William Nicholson with his wife Mabel Pryde, also a painter, and their children Nancy, Tony, Ben and Kit (who married Elsie Queen Myers 'EQ Nicholson': she designed Black Goose, the fabric used for Farewell Leicester Square).

The Cook Vanessa Bell 1948 © Arts Council Collection. There is an interesting debate that has just begun on the Forum – please join in – about Mollie Panter-Downes not writing in depth about servants/cooks. The last person to comment says that Mollie presumably stuck to the rule of writing about what you know. 'Maybe an ability to write about what one does not know is a distinguishing feature of a writer who is great as opposed to merely good or popular or enjoyable.' Very interesting point, but think Jane Austen, think EM Forster. More likely it's that writers tend to write about what they know and tend to be middle-class for all kinds of reasons to do with education, time to write etc. Vanessa Bell would not have painted The Cook (and called the painting that rather than Fish or Haymaking or The Kitchen Table) if she had not had a cook at Charleston. And been able to paint because she wasn't doing the cooking herself.

They are looking at IT Pancake Mixture! The woman's turban makes this 1940s, but the shelves are so full maybe it's 1950s. Can't you just see the wooden counter and the bentwood chair and imagine the bacon slicer and the smell of paraffin (for those of you to young to remember, this is what you bought in oil cans in order to fill the paraffin heaters, and oddly enough it came from grocery shops). It's so, well, reassuring that he wears a tie for work. This is presumably what 59 Lamb's Conduit Street looked like in the days when it was a grocer (cf the Post for 18 October 2010).

Yesterday's picture will have been familiar to a few Persephone readers because it was in a very ancient Quarterly. This picture is more current as we use it to illustrate The Priory, but it's so fascinating that here it is on the Post as well: A Kitchen Scene 1929 by FW Elwell © The Estate of FW Elwell. The place to go and see Fred Elwell's paintings is Beverley in Yorkshire.

This week on the Post: aspects of food and kitchens. This appalling ad is undated but must be 1930s. Was it meant to be funny? Or was it making a serious point (for heavens sake, don't be so clueless, there's the cheese next to the flowers, or if you can't see it go and get it for yourself)? Or was it to be taken at face value – no Kraft cheese does literally mean their lunch (?luncheon) is spoilt? Rather hard to work it out – we need to ask the Provincial Lady.

The writer of the Post knew Jane Grigson – we were Newnham 'associates' together in the late 1980s – and she was indeed, as the DNB entry says, 'generous, scholarly and deeply cheerful'. Interestingly, she too began her career as a translator (having left Newnham in 1949) but became well-known as a cookery writer: her English Food is a staple in many people's kitchens, as is her Vegetable Book. There is a Jane Grigson Trust and the Jane Grigson Library is at Oxford Brookes University: here is an article about its formation and here is an article by Jane's daughter Sophie Grigson, also an excellent cookery writer, about her father Geoffrey.

Another great translator, in later life more famous as a diarist: Frances Partridge, who arrived at Newnham in 1918 (but unfortunately did not keep a diary when young). She was a great friend of Julia Strachey and wrote the Preface to our edition of Cheerful Weather for the Wedding. Here she is when she was still Frances Marshall, with her future husband Ralph Partridge and Bernard Penrose.

This is a photograph of Hope Mirrlees (in hat), who went up to Newnham in 1910. She is at Ottoline Morrell's house in Bloomsbury and it must be between 1928 and 1931 as the Morrells did not move to 10 Gower Street until 1928 and Lytton Strachey died in early 1932. There is a web page about Hope Mirrlees here, a Facebook page, a photograph of her when young on the cover of Michael Swanwick's limited edition biography of her and a DNB entry by Julia Briggs, whom I remember coming in to the shop one day (as she so often did, we miss her enormously) and telling me all about Paris. But alas if we cannot sell Lettice Delmer it's unlikely we can sell Paris. © National Portrait Gallery.

Amber Reeves went up to Newnham in 1905 and is (unfortunately in some ways) best known for her affair with HG Wells which inspired Ann Veronica. Later she married Rivers Blanco White and lived near Elizabeth Jenkins in Downshire Hill, Hampstead. She was a rather good novelist, definitely on our longlist. Here is an article about her by Margaret Drabble. Here is the Orlando article and here is the link to Sally Alexander's article in the DNB. Persephone readers will know Amber Reeves's name because she was the daugher of Maud Pember Reeves who wrote Round about a Pound a Week. There is a 1992 book about them, Maud and Amber, published in New Zealand (which is where the family lived when Amber was small, they came to England in 1896); it has a rather wonderful photograph of Amber at Newnham in 1908. Confession time: the doer of the Persephone Post has not yet installed a scanner at home although she has been meaning to for ages, and therefore cannot scan in the photo. Apologies. When said scanner is installed we might have a Maud and Amber week as there is another amazing photograph of Amber teaching a psychology class at Morley College in the 1950s which I suspect regular viewers of the Post would enjoy. The girls look like Sylvia Plath. Amber is wearing a hat!

This weekend saw the launch of the Newnham Literary Archive at Cambridge. Since Newnham is a women-only college, all the writers who have donated to, or are represented in, the archive could be Persephone authors although, for various reasons, only Amy Levy is so far on our list. FM Mayor, who went up in 1892, Elizabeth Jenkins, who went up in 1924 (and died last year aged 104) and Sylvia Plath, who was at Newnham from 1955-7, are the three authors we would publish if we could but there are others who are very much on our longlist and these we shall celebrate this week. First of all, Constance Garnett, who went up to Newnham in the same year as Amy Levy, 1879, and became one of the greatest translators of all time. Here is the wikipedia link, but for those with access to it (a British library card for example) she is also in the DNB and on the Orlando Project, and there is a biography (Constance Garnett: A Heroic Life) by her grandson which has been reprinted as a Faber Find.

Woodbridge Lodge Rendlesham Suffolk in 1953, when it was meticulously looked after – it seems to have now been demolished. Rendlesham Hall was built in 1780, destroyed by fire in 1830 and then rebuilt, finally to be pulled down in 1949. Woodbridge and Ivy Lodges were built as gatehouses in 1790, they were meant to look ruined and Ivy Lodge, which looks like an abandoned castle, is still lived in. Edwin Smith published many books of his own in his lifetime, a book about him and his work is available here. His second wife was Olive Cook (1912-2002), whose papers now form part of the Newnham Literary Archive being launched today, more about her on the Post in a few weeks.

Hidcote 1962 © V &A (oh dear, how sad that the link of choice is wikipedia not the National Trust. But isn't there something slightly naff about the way the National Trust describe things? If you go to Blickling there's a huge notice saying, roughly, 'enjoy beautiful Blickling.' We know Blickling's beautiful. That's why we're there.) This Edwin Smith photograph would be an excellent illustration for Gardener's Nightcap. Ah, the garden – look at this heavenly photograph of hyacinths that we put on Facebook yesterday. And visitors to Lamb's Conduit Street will find that the daffodils in our window boxes are just about to come into bloom and the blue winter-flowering pansies have miraculously revived so the shop front is, well, a picture.

St Mary's, Swinbrook, Oxfordshire. Swinbrook is where the Mitford girls grew up so Nancy's The Pursuit of Love (definitely in our top ten and always on our table of 'fifty books we wish we had published') had its origins here.

Someone has downloaded thirty-four of Edwin Smith's photographs onto Picasa here. This is Galleria Umberto 1 in Naples in 1963. Could the businessmen have posed deliberately or is it just chance that they look as though they are on the set of a ballet or an opera?

Members of SPAB (Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings), which obviously we are at Persephone Books, receive Cornerstone four times a year. The content is not available online; but this might encourage a few people to subscribe in order to receive the recent number. In it they will find an excellent article about Edwin Smith, who took (but take seems a rather bland word for these extraordinary photographs) the pictures of Peggy Angus's kitchen and the front wall of Furlongs on the Post last week. The article says that Smith once described photography as 'co-operating with the inevitable' (which is perhaps what a modest writer would say about a novel or a short story); and that 'many of his pictures were made with the large format plate cameras which render architectural detail with such precision. From the big negatives these produced – not without considerable effort, for an exposure of half an hour might not be unusual in a dim church interior – he made exquisite prints that translate the building's character into a symphony of subtle tones and shades.' This 1966 photograph of steps at Castle Ward, Co. Down is at the V & A.

James Ramsay Macdonald with members of his family by Peggy Angus 1930s © National Portrait Gallery. Are they Scottish? Could this be House-Bound?

Another Edwin Smith photograph of Furlongs, also available to buy as a print here.

Some of Peggy Angus's designs have been reproduced as fabric and wallpaper by two companies, Blithfield and Fabrics & Papers. The pink is cheering for another 'white cloud' morning; and of course the green would have been perfect for Dorothy Whipple's Greenbanks this autumn but 'Oakleaves', as this is called, looks like a post-war design (Greenbanks is early Whipple, 1932).

Here is Peggy's kitchen photographed in 1953 by Edwin Smith (1912-71) © RIBA library, available as a 'silver gelatin' print from Chris Beetles. Who wants posh when they could have proper milk bottles and a wooden table and oil lamps and Peggy's own wallpaper? (Someone at a Distance was first published in 1953, yet it doesn't seem likely Peggy would have been getting it out of Boots Lending Library in Lewes; nowadays she could buy it at the amazing Much Ado Books in Alfriston, which stocks all our books and where Dorothy Whipple is an especial favourite.)