This week the Post looks back at twentieth-century Japan. Fumiko Enchi is one of Japan's foremost women writers. Her novel The Waiting Years (1949-57) would fit perfectly into the Persephone list but (un?)fortunately is still in print. We try to have it in the shop as one of "the fifty books we wish we had published" but for some reason Bertrams rarely has it in stock. The novel is set in turn-of-the-century Japan and tells the story of Tomo who is sent by her husband, an eminent government official, to Tokyo in order to choose him a concubine. It is beautifully written and conveys perfectly the forbearance of women in a rigidly patriarchal society.

A Farewell 1876 Christian Krohg (1852-1925) © Gothenburg Art Museum, Sweden/ Bridgeman Art Library.

Grandmother and Child, Yorkshire Henry Silkstone Hopwood (1860-1914) © Private Collection/John Davies FinePaintings/Bridgeman Art Library.

Lady Mary Bagot and Granddaughter Mary by John Michael Wright (1617-94) © Wolverhampton Art Gallery/PCF. No knitting here, but they are holding something that they might have made together.

The Chimney Corner by Joseph Clark (1834-1926) © Private Collection/ Christopher Wood Gallery. It's very curious that so many of the paintings of grandmothers show them knitting or sewing. We need Jane Brocket to deconstruct this for us – it's presumably to do with the grandmother wanting to be seen as a calm uninterfering presence who isn't watching things too beadily.

To celebrate Dorothy Whipple's Greenbanks: a week of grandmothers, and granddaughters. First Grandmother Knits 1943 by David Simpson Foggie © Glasgow Museums/Public Catalogue Foundation.

And lastly Virginia Woolf's writing hut in the garden at Monk's House in Rodmell, Sussex. It's interesting that all the writers had such austere chairs.

And again from Writers' Houses: this is Hemingway's study (wasn't he wonderfully acted in Midnight in Paris?). Apparently he used to write standing up 'because you have more vitality on your feet...but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.'

The study at Marguerite Yourcenar's house in Northeast Harbor, Maine, where she lived from 1950 until 1987. Here is Susha Guppy's interview with her for the Paris Review.

Karen Blixen's desk at Rungsted, Denmark.

Writers' rooms this week, taken from Writers' Houses (1995) by Francesca Premoli-Droulers, photographs by Erica Lennard. Here is Vita Sackville-West's study at Sissinghurst.

And finally Helen Hull herself. There is almost nothing on the internet about her, only this and this and then there is this article which says: 'Feminist scholars have recovered some of the important women who wrote in the first half the 20th century, namely Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Fannie Hurst and Zora Neale Hurston. But where is Helen Hull's Hardy Perennial (1933)?' Well, where are any of her novels, especially Heat Lightning (1932)? But Persephone Books is going to try and change things! For a start, is there anyone reading the Post who lives in New York City and could come to a Persephone event in celebration of Helen Hull? This will of course be on MacDougal, not alas be at Polly's (unless Woody Allen could organise it) but at Caffe Reggio 119 MacDougal on Friday 28th October at 11 a.m. The writer of the Persephone Post will be there (she is visiting New York for a week) and will look forward to buying coffee and croissants for any Persephone reader who can make it. She will be holding a grey Persephone book and a copy of Heat Lightning (if enough people had read it by then we could have brief book group) and at noon we will go along the street to the NYU building where Polly's once was and where Helen Hull and Susan Glaspell and the other members of the Heterodoxy Club all used to meet. There we might have a brief reading. It would be great to see you!

The Provincetown Playhouse was at 133 MacDougal Street from 1918 onwards. Here is an excellent history of the theatre, it really is extremely sad that NYU were given permission to demolish the original building - cf. this blog headed 'Provincetown Playhouse Gets its Death Sentence' with another beautiful photograph of the original facade. Between 1916 and 1922 Susan Glaspell wrote eleven plays for the theatre, they are listed on this page on the Susan Glaspell Society site; we just wish that Susan Glaspell scholars would focus more on Fidelity (1915), her best work but still only known to Persephone readers and woefully under-appreciated in America.

Members of the Heterodoxy Club met at Polly's every other Saturday (presumably the men in the photograph below weren't allowed in, perhaps they went upstairs to the Liberal Club on the first floor). The only qualification for membership was to have an interest in women's issues and to have produced creative work. NYU has unfortunately just demolished the original buildings at 133-139 MacDougal Street, although it was eventually persuaded to keep part of the facade. Here is a blog about the rebuilding by someone who was keeping a keen eye to see that NYU fulfilled its part of the bargain. There is something bitterly ironic about the buildings which housed the Provincetown Theatre, the Liberal Club and so much else becoming an extension of – NYU's Law School.

The Heterodoxy Club met here, at Polly's 137 MacDougal Street. One of the women in this c. 1915 photograph could be Susan Glaspell, who published her greatest novel Fidelity in 1915. And another could have been Helen Hull, who had not yet published a novel but was just about to take up her post as Professor of English at Columbia. We are feeling about this photo rather like Gil feels about 1920s Paris in Midnight in Paris, however, this trailer is so keen not to give away the joke – rightly of course – that you can't tell this is a time travel movie (perhaps they thought it would put people off rather like saying the superb Hopkins Manuscript is science fiction?). Anyway, after midnight Gil goes back to his first love, the Paris of Scott and Zelda, Hemingway etc. We would like to go back to Polly's on MacDougal.

Heterodoxy this week. What? you are asking. Well, just before and during the First World War there was a group of women in Greenwich Village in New York who formed a club for women. Like the Apostles at Cambridge, it was completely secret so very little is known about it. But there were over a hundred members and one of them was our new obsession, the novelist Helen Hull. This Feminist Manifesto ( apparently a rough draft of the original) begins: 'The feminist movement as at present instituted is Inadequate. Women - if you want to realise yourselves - you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval.'

'By the 1960s their painting style had evolved to be virtually indistinguishable from one another so by mutual agreement Lionel radically changed his approach to embrace a sort of informed pointilism.' This is Walberswick, In the Dunes, it is instantly recognisable (you can feel the sand and smell the sea) to anyone who has ever been there. 'Lionel's death [in 1992] left [Margaret] totally bereft. She lived on for eleven years, unable to start another picture.'

It's rather well put in the foreword to A Painting Partnership - the catalogue to this new exhibition of their work - that 'MargaretandLionel' were 'painters of deep devotion and quiet, private passion. Their pictures were focused on expanding points of colour and expressed a joy in small things...' Here is an obituary in the Independent. The only duff note is Margaret Green refusal to say how old she was, this always seems rather a self-centred thing to do – skirting the issue is one thing, but refusal... This painting is by Lionel (and it's often hard to tell who painted what) is The Last Bus, no. 33 in the catalogue.

Oh dear, it's all rush this week as today we have to be at the shop at 7.30 because they are filming an episode of Made in Chelsea there (not our usual demographic, but hey...) and then Maureen Lipman is coming to speak at a lunch. Tomorrow there really will be more about Lionel Bulmer and Margaret Green (about whom Ken Howard, their friend, spoke touchingly at Messum's opening last night). The star of the show for us was this Margaret Green gouache called New Dresses.

This painting, Cottage Interior with Margaret, has already sold as well. More tomorrow on this unique 'painting partnership' (today we are recovering from the stress of finishing the Biannually, slices of cold cucumber metaphorically on our eyes).

The new Biannually and Catalogue go to the printer at noon today so there is no time for anything but a quick mention of the subjects of the Post this week – Lionel Bulmer and Margaret Green. A sale of their work opens in London on Wednesday. Meanwhile here is The Corner House 1958 by Margaret Green. Unsurprisingly it is one of the paintings that has already sold.