And just in case anyone is feeling light-hearted and thinks that the suffragettes were a question of nice oil paintings of Mrs Pankhurst, and merrily chucking things at policemen, and scarves – this is a drawing by a suffragette of her cell in Holloway. It comes from the fascinating Suffragette's Blog where someone has transcribed a diary kept by a prisoner in July 1909. The suffragette's identity is unknown but she was clearly a factory or office worker (like Jenny in No Surrender) because she writes (15th July 1909): 'No sunshine can get into this cell... However my room at Stamford and Metcalf where I sat for 4 years was not much lighter than this.'

One mustn't be frivolous but this 'motor scarf' in Japanese silk is indeed, as a June 1908 newspaper advertisement proclaimed, a thing of beauty. It can be seen at the Museum of London.

Emmeline Pankhurst was painted in 1927 by Georgina Brackenbury, who, like her sister Marie, had herself been a suffragette: © National Portrait Gallery. Their mother Hilda Brackenbury was also a suffragette. She lived at 2 Campden Hill Square, known as Mouse Castle because members of the WSPU went there to recuperate after being released under the Cat and Mouse Act. After she died the Suffragette Fellowship commissioned a plaque to hang in the house, now in the Musuem of London. Mary Thompson wrote in a letter accompanying her contribution to the plaque: 'The Brackenbury trio were so whole-hearted and helpful during all the early strenuous years of the militant suffragette movement. We remember them with honour.'

A detail from a Holloway Prison banner (the whole banner can be seen here). It was first carried in the From Prison to Citizenship procession in June 1910 and includes the embroidered signatures of eighty suffragette hunger strikers 'who had faced death without flinching'. Mary Leigh is in the lefthand column sixth down and Constance Lytton is the top signature in the second column; but it's not just the famous names who matter, all eighty women were hugely brave and inspirational, They can be read about in Elizabeth Crawford's magisterial books about the suffragettes, The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide and The Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain and Ireland. A postcard of this banner is available from the Museum of London; we were sent it by Anthony Quinn, author of the excellent suffragette novel Half of the Human Race. He will be coming to the shop to discuss No Surrender, his own novel, and the suffragettes in general on November 23rd; and we hope Elizabeth Crawford will be there too (on October 15th she is giving a talk about the suffragettes and their dress at the London College of Fashion).

The suffragettes this week: in celebration of our forthcoming publication of No Surrender by Constance Maud, which first came out in November 1911. This 1909 poster, advertising the weekly suffragette newspaper Votes for Women, was designed by Hilda Dallas (1878-1958); we have it hanging in the shop and it's available from the Museum of London.

The original cover for the cookery book we are doing next month (apologies for its scruffy state). We probably won't be reproducing it in the October Biannually: Dinners for Beginners is 1934 and is about everyday meals in the 1930s. But the girl in the picture has a definite eighteenth century air (although there is a modern gas stove in the foreground.)

Then of course there were the Victor Gollancz jackets. they were always yellow, with lettering and no pictures – presumably the first edition didn't have the quotes and was just plain yellow. We are publishing Harriet next April. The only book by Elizabeth Jenkins that has been in print recently is The Tortoise and the Hare; we sell it in the shop as one of the Fifty Books we wish we had Published.

And here is the American jacket for They Were Sisters. It has no hint of menace, whereas the dark urn and the impression that someone (?imprisoned) is looking down from an attic at a jolly scene below make the English jacket much bleaker. Then the lettering on the English jacket is dark and blocky whereas on the American it is white and attractive. Note that the American jacket has the dog; since his fate is one of the most upsetting things in the book it was actually more tactful not to put him on the cover.

The cover (or jacket indeed) for They Were Sister by Dorothy Whipple, first published in November 1943. Her publisher Sir John Murray wrote to her: 'You have scored another real success. You have a wonderful power of taking quite ordinary people in quite unromantic surroundings, in their normal ways of life, and making them live and impress themselves on your readers' minds in a way that really grips. If the general public enjoys the story anything like as much as I have there will be no doubt about success.' (Random Commentary p. 146).

We have returned from the metaphorical France, to what Persephone Books is all about – books. This week, book covers and here is the original cover for Brook Evans. On Facebook we asked if anyone could help us get hold of a copy of the 1930 film of Susan Glaspell's Brook Evans, The Right to Love (here and here). This led to IMDB and the comment that the film was recently restored by Universal but is unavailable except for private screenings. If anyone reads this and has friends at Universal please do contact us and maybe in 2012 we could have a Persephone readers event (at the LA equivalent of the BFI?) so we can all watch what is obviously an extraordinary film. And an extraordinary book, that goes without saying.

Back to Annot. Wandering up this street (the columns are apparently in front of a C17th palace) in order to return to London, start writing the new Persephone Biannually, go to the Out of Print conference in Norwich today, finish planting daffodil bulbs – the effect of an imaginary holiday in France has been very restorative.

Greengages and Charentais melons (in 'real' life from The People's Supermarket, which has consistently superb fruit and vegetables), a good book and a comfortable chair and the imaginary holiday has become almost real.

And after sitting in the shady main square for a while, a wander up and down or in this case from one side to the other of a Provencal village. This is Ménerbes in the Vaucluse, it 'lies along the top of a narrow, wooded hill below the northern slopes of the Lubéron.'

In Bargemon in the Var, 'the grandest of all the many fountains forms the centrepiece of the elm-shaded main square' of this 'large and lively village, idyllically set in hilly, wooded countryside, carpeted with orange trees and mimosas. It was greatly favoured by the Romans, perhaps on account of its mild climate and famed spring waters, and has retained an extensive section of its medieval ramparts and numerous medieval stone houses. But what makes the village so special are its many shaded streets and small, fountain-adorned squares.' An idyll.

For some reason we are longing for a holiday in France. Perhaps it was that North Devon, while magical in many ways, was not quite enough of a change. So this week on the Post a fantasy French holiday, taken from the 1994 Thames & Hudson book The Most Beautiful Villages of Provence by Michael Jacobs, photographs by Hugh Palmer. We would start at Annot in the Var valley. The caption reads: 'A typical Provencal scene: sunlight filtering through the plane trees of Annot's lively main square stipples the faded facade of the Hotel Grace, a family-run establishment of great charm.' With a croissant, coffee and new favourite novelist Helen Hull we would be in heaven.

Wings over Water 1930 © Tate was begun in Cornwall and completed in Frances Hodgkins' studio in Hampstead. There is an excellent and very detailed piece about this painting here and it was published in The Journal of New Zealand Art History in 2005. In a few months the Post will return to Frances Hodgkins: her work and life are incredibly interesting on many levels. But first stop the British Library to read the Letters.

Frances Hodgkins' letters are available here and EH McCormick's The Expatriate: a study of Frances Hodgkins and New Zealand here: it would have been good to have them before doing this week of posts, but perhaps we can have a reprise in the Biannually. They were drawn on by the actress Darien Takle (seen here as Frances) in order to write a one woman show about her (yes, we have written to ask if she will be performing it in the UK, fingers crossed).

This is Lancashire Family 1927 ©​ Auckland City Art Gallery. EA Sheppard has written an essay here about five Frances Hodgkins paintings in which he says that this one 'shows her cautiously experimenting with Cubism' at a period of 'deference to "advanced" theories of art and experimentation with "new" pictorial modes, so that the sensitive portraiture which had been the natural and most telling expression of her genius was now formalised in the interests of abstract design.' In other words, if this is true, she was not painting in the way that came naturally to her but trying to be more avant-garde. It would be interesting to speculate about this theory of modernism (that painters and writers and musicians choose to adopt its methods rather than do so instinctively) in relation to some of 'our' writers. Would Dorothy Whipple's Someone at a Distance have been more widely read (indeed read at all, at the time) if its prose had been experimental and it had adopted the newly-fashionable ideas of the angry young men? Well, it would of course.

Belgian Refugees 1916 © Christchurch Art Gallery, New Zealand. There are some more Frances Hodgkins paintings here.

Frances Hodgkins (1869-1947) is considered one of New Zealand's most important painters, although much of her working life was spent in Britain. In 1948 Myfanwy Evans published a book about her in the Penguin Modern Painters series, available here. Still Life with Eggs, Tomatoes and Mushrooms © Royal Pavilion, Libraries and Museums, Brighton & Hove/Bridgeman was painted in 1929. We were going to use it on the cover of a Classic edition of Good Things in England. Now we are almost certainly going to stick with the ten Classics rather than publish any more; but it would have made a perfect cover.

So we are rather keen to go here next summer: rain, walking boots, emptiness, evenings by the fire. And we would definitely go by train – for a fortnight, in September (the orders are coming in thick and fast, which will keep us busy for the next few days).

And here is Bridlington, also from the Bridgeman site, more summery than autumnal but at least it's sunny here in London: today we are doing a special Fortnight in September offer (buy three books and receive a free copy. Offer open for the next fortnight!).