And because hats are on all our minds, here is the charming Self Portrait in a Straw Hat 1782 by Louise Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun (1755-1842) © National Gallery, London.

Self Portrait with Apron and Brushes 1887 © National Museum in Cracow. It is by the Polish painter Anna Bilinska-Bohdanowicz (1857-1893), chosen – obviously – because she is sitting on a bentwood chair, but actually one can only marvel at the beauty and sincerity and intelligence of a painting like this.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.'

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.)

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...

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).

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.

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...

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.)

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

Garden fete 2010 by Francis Farmar. Nowhere but England...