The Persephone Post

2012-01-30T07:01:00.001Z

This week on the Post: French painters and musicians who, in some indefinable way, have influenced our books. Berthe Morisot (1841-95) showed The Cradle, which hangs at the Musée d'Orsay, at the Impressionist exhibition of 1874 that included work by Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, Monet and Sisley; the painting failed to sell, and stayed in the artist's family until bought by the Louvre in 1930. One could draw all kinds of conclusions about domesticity in art; the dominance of male Impressionist painters; the subjects that were considered suitable for painters and writers – and those that were not; the fact that Morisot was not commercially successful in her lifetime. But let's just rejoice that 120 years after her death The Cradle draws the crowds.

2012-01-27T08:00:00.000Z

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 - 2000), is another Somerville College alumna, most famous for her 1979 Booker Prize winning novel Offshore. This bromide print was taken in 1999, and hangs in the National Portrait Gallery (© Jillian Edelstein / Camera Press). Fitzgerald was the niece of Persephone author Winifred Peck, and in the Times Literary Supplement in 1985 she stated: "if I could have back one of the many Winifred Peck titles I once possessed I would choose House-Bound" (Persephone Book No. 72), for which she wrote the preface. Penelope Fitzgerald began her literary career aged 58 with the publication of a biography of the Pre-Raphelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. She was included in a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945", printed by The Times in 2008.

2012-01-26T08:00:00.001Z

Marghanita Laski was born in 1915 and read English at Somerville College after working in fashion. This 1968 photograph of her is at the National Portrait Gallery (© Estate of Jorge Lewinski). Laski was a novelist, journalist and radio panellist. She contributed thousands of entries to the Oxford English Dictionary. Some of the BBC broadcasts in which she was involved in the 1950s and '60s are available to view here; four of her novels, including the wonderful Little Boy Lost, can be found on our website.

2012-01-25T08:00:00.000Z

This picture of Margaret Kennedy was taken by Alexander Bassano and hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Kennedy was a celebrated novelist and playwright and is best known for her 1924 novel The Constant Nymph, of which there are two film adaptations. The novel was supposedly inspired by painter Augustus John's family. Margaret Kennedy's life and work features in Susan J. Leonardi's book about earlier Somerville writers, Dangerous by Degrees.

2012-01-24T08:00:00.000Z

Winifred Holtby met Vera Brittain at Somerville College. After an antagonistic beginning, the two women eventually became friends and lived together on Doughty Street (where there is now a blue plaque), just around the corner from the shop. Holtby interrupted her degree to join the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps in 1918 but resumed her studies at Oxford thereafter. Holtby was a novelist, feminist, socialist and social reformer. Her best-known novel South Riding was recently adapted by the BBC. Her 1924 novel The Crowded Street about a young woman trying to escape the limitations of provincial life is Persephone Book No. 76.

2012-01-23T08:00:00.006Z

From Paris to Oxford this week. Here is a picture of the library loggia at Somerville College after it was converted into a hospital for convalescing soldiers during the First World War. Somerville was established as a women's college in 1879 and its alumnae include Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margaret Kennedy, all of whom went up between 1912-19. Vera Brittain volunteered as a V.A.D. nurse in 1915 and did not work in the library hospital but would have been familiar with scenes like this. Her memoir Testament of Youth is a powerful and honest account of the losses she endured during WWI. Read a review of it by Diana Athill here; Testament of Youth is firmly among the fifty books we wish we had published.

2012-01-20T07:35:00.001Z

In yesterday's photograph this painting can be seen on the wall to Gertrude's right. It is Cezanne's The Artist's Wife in an Armchair 1867, normally in the Buhrle Collection, Zurich. Persephone readers might be tempted to mutter the word Greenbanks on looking at this painting; but anyone reading or listening to If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso here will realise that the words Dorothy Whipple and Gertrude Stein are a total oxymoron.

2012-01-19T08:08:00.003Z

So here are Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, with whom she lived after the rift with Leo, in another room in the rue de Fleurus in 1921. And here are some recordings of Gertrude reading and talking. The photograph is by Man Ray and is © Collection du Centre Pompidou.

2012-01-18T07:42:00.002Z

The paintings are sublime of course. But visitors to the exhibition have to keep an appalling and upsetting fact at the forefront of their mind: that although Leo Stein has been called 'arguably the greatest collector of early modern art in the C20th' (in a very good New York Times review by Andrea Barnet of the 1996 book about Leo and Gertrude, Sister Brother by Brenda Wineapple) and built up the Stein collection between 1903 and 1914: after the rupture between the two of them and the dispersal of the collection, they never spoke again. It is really impossible to look at these incredible paintings without feeling unutterably depressed about that fact. Especially as some of us have very, very mixed feelings about Gertrude's importance as a writer. As Andrea Barnet puts it: 'History, of course, has a way of sorting things out. Leo Stein would be remembered, in the words of Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, as ''possibly the most discerning connoisseur of 20th-century painting in the world.'' Gertrude, Ms. Wineapple writes, would become ''one of the most well-known literary personages people hadn't read.'' Leo bought Matisse's Femme au chapeau (normally at the San Francisco Moma but temporarily in Paris) in 1905.

2012-01-17T06:21:00.003Z

Gertrude and Leo lived together in the rue de Fleurus from 1903-14. A 1968 article in the New York Times (written at the time the collection was being sold and dispersed; some of it has been reassembled for this exhibition) commented in a pre-Midnight in Paris fashion: 'On a typical Saturday evening, 60 years ago, one would have found Gertrude Stein at her post in the atelier, garbed in brown corduroy, sitting in a high-backed Renaissance chair, her legs dangling, next to the big cast-iron stove that heated the chilly room.' Here is some more background to the Stein collection.

2012-01-16T07:10:00.007Z

The Steins in the Courtyard at 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris c. 1905: Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso...L'Aventure des Stein, a sell-out exhibition in Paris, is on at the Grand Palais for one more week (having been been in America as The Steins Collect); it is about Leo, Allan and Gertrude, and Michael and his wife Sarah, and their extraordinary instinct for buying modern art. Here is an American video, and here is the French one (click on the text next to the black and white photograph).

2012-01-13T07:00:00.002Z

The Post in fact comes from Paris this week, from the Marais, and despite the joys of the city, the weather (sunny and mild), the clothes, the food, the books – it is impossible not to be continually reminded of what was happening 70 years ago. So the final plaque commemorates Charles Coward, who helped to rescue hundreds of prisoners while he was interned at Auschwitz. This is a photograph of him giving evidence at Nuremberg in 1947. And this is the plaque on his house at 133 Chichester Road, Edmonton.

2012-01-12T07:37:00.001Z

Eric Ravilious lived at 48 Upper Mall, Chiswick from 1931-5. The Stork at Hammersmith (1932) 'depicts the view from the north side of the Thames east towards Hammersmith Bridge' (page 157 Lived in London) © Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne/Bridgeman Art Library.

2012-01-11T08:22:00.001Z

Rosalind Franklin was hardly older than Katherine Mansfield when she died. Her plaque is at Donovan Court, Drayton Gardens, South Kensington, where she lived from 1951 until her death in 1958.

2012-01-10T08:18:00.005Z

William Roberts lived at 14 St Mark's Crescent in Primrose Hill. After his son died in 1995 efforts were made to preserve the house in the same way as Charleston has been preserved; it so much deserved saving, but London house prices were by then so high this proved impossible. However, there is a William Roberts Society, and here is a superbly insightful, delicate and informative talk about the Roberts house by Pauline Paucker. Also, at the end of the talk there is a 'video tour' (on youtube) of the house (it's fourteen minutes long, but Persephone Post readers will not want to miss a single second; it gives an extraordinary impression of exactly how the house was).

2012-01-09T07:24:00.002Z

Blue plaques this week, taken from the English Heritage book Lived in London that we sell in the shop. In July 1918 Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry moved to 'The Elephant' (so called on account of its greyness and size) at what was then 2 Portland Villas and is now 17 East Heath Road overlooking the Heath. Katherine only lived here for a few months: because of her health she went abroad and died in France on 9th January 1923.

2012-01-06T07:31:00.001Z

After yesterday's marathon (all the boxes collected by 3.30) we can concentrate on royalty statements, a January special offer (in a week or two), getting the April books to the printer... And then starting on the October books and the 2013 diary (hundreds of people asked about a diary for 2012. Last year's was meant to be a one-off but by 'popular demand' we shall be doing one for next year). Meanwhile some of us are off to Paris to read, eat, slump on sofas – and occasionally take gentle walks inspired by David Gentleman's Paris. The painting above has never been reproduced before and was kindly sent to us by the artist's daughter a few weeks ago. It is by Sir James Gunn, who painted the portrait on the front of our Classic edition of Someone at a Distance, and he did it when he was 18 ie in 1911.

2012-01-05T08:06:00.001Z

Today we are busy sending out copies of the reprint of Still Missing, 1500 of them, which is the number of people who ordered it from other bookshops after the Radio 4 broadcast. We made the decision not to supply Gardners with all the copies they wanted but to hold enough back for our readers, and luckily we never ran out. After the packing up of the boxes, and their collection by our two stalwart courier companies, we hope to slump in armchairs as per this Samuel John Peploe painting (more likely the slumping will be postponed until the weekend). Blue and White Teapot 1917 is at Kirkcaldy, which coincidentally is where Marjory Fleming lived until her death at the age of 8 on 19th December 1811 – it would be the perfect New Year read. Nb Samuel John Peploe was related to DE Stevenson by marriage – he was her husband's uncle.

2012-01-04T08:01:00.002Z

A Rex Whistler drawing, undated (but don't blame the work experience girl, it may not have been dated in the original Quarterly): an image of calm and freedom and domesticity to bear in mind as we take down the decorations and festoon the house with drying sheets. When the tree has been removed from the shop window, we are going to display the (so far) seventeen translations of Persephone books – in languages ranging from French to Czech to Chinese. It would be more – most publishers make their bread and butter from translation rights – but we were a bit slow to realise that anyone would want to publish our books in other languages. Miss Buncle in German anyone? Miss Pettigrew in Korean? It's slightly unbelievable. And we now have the lovely Mary Esdaile who sells translation rights for us, so there are lots more to come.

2012-01-03T08:25:00.003Z

Today the shop is open as usual. Despite yesterday's wonderful sunshine over London, we all feel a bit like this: 'Winter', a wood engraving scanned in from a ten-year-old Persephone Quarterly by one of our staunch work experience girls. Happy New Year to all Persephone readers!

2011-12-30T09:04:00.001Z

Posy Simmonds (who lives not far from the shop) very kindly allowed us to use this in a Persephone Quarterly a few years ago (it first appeared in the Guardian in 1979). If you click, it will enlarge – and is guaranteed to bring a smile to the face of any harassed mother. Here are some more cartoons to make you laugh.

2011-12-29T07:59:00.001Z

We are open today and tomorrow! Miki is in Japan so only two of us will be: sending out orders; packing up books for bookshops; starting the royalty statements; and serving customers – it would be great to see anyone who happens to be in Bloomsbury.

2011-12-23T07:52:00.001Z

London in the snow – an English Heritage photograph, on a card sent to us by Winifred Watson's family. Happy Christmas to everyone! (PS: the Post will follow shop hours this year ie. will appear on Thursday 29th and Friday 30th and then be back to 'normal' on January 3rd.)

2011-12-22T09:23:00.001Z

We may have had this on the Post before but it is so apt for this time of year – an undergraduate in 'a room of one's own' at Newnham. We are thinking of having a Dorothy Whipple day there next September. (And do look at Charles Lock's talk about the blessed Dorothy in the latest Fortnightly Letter.)

2011-12-21T08:01:00.001Z

This is how most of us would like to be over Christmas – like Marion Rutherford in the 1950s, painted by Harry Rutherford © Thameside Museums and Galleries Service/Public Catalogue Foundation. Harry Rutherford is our new favourite painter, more about him on the Post in January.

2011-12-20T07:50:00.000Z

John Nash Interior 1925: an image of domestic contentment that we all need to bear in mind during the next few days of chaos.

2011-12-19T08:45:00.002Z

Oddments this week, all slightly Christmas-y. This is A Boy Bringing Bread by Pieter de Hooch at the Wallace Collection, Greenbanks a few centuries early.

2011-12-16T08:45:00.004Z

This 1921 painting is at the National Portrait Gallery. We used it in the 2011-12 Persephone catalogue to illustrate Midsummer Night in the Workhouse (the catalogue is sent free of charge, or you can pick it up in the shop, or you'll find the pdf on our home page, the link at the bottom of the page on the left). It's the singer Winifred Radford and she looks like Diana Athill, we thought. Here is a photograph of Meredith Frampton in 1982, surely the woman on the left is Winifred Radford, in which case the comment yesterday that Marguerite Kelsey was the only living sitter was wrong. Or is it Mrs Frampton? (Megan Wilson used the painting for the cover of The Painted Veil here, scroll down the second page).

2011-12-15T07:43:00.002Z

Marguerite Kelsey 1928, painted in the artist's studio in St John's Wood. The magnolias had to be painted extremely fast as they did not long retain their form. At the Tate Gallery retrospective Marguerite was the only still-living sitter represented in the exhibition who had not been traced. On seeing reviews she contacted the Gallery and Meredith Frampton. More (very interesting) detail about the painting here.

2011-12-14T08:01:00.001Z

Dr Clive Forster-Cooper FRS 1945: an eminent palaeontologist, he lived at the Natural History Museum during the war in order to look after the collections. This is believed to be Meredith Frampton's last painting. It was sold at Bonham's in January 2010. (And cf. the 1943 portrait of Sir Ernest Gowers which appeared on the Post on 20th September last year.)

2011-12-13T06:56:00.001Z

Still Life 1927. 'Meredith Frampton developed a fondness for "dressing" his pictures with disparate objects – telephones, test-tubes, spent matches, tape measures, screeds of paper, single stem flowers, pieces of fruit, ears of corn – that he would then spend weeks rendering with a photographic and, at the same time, rather eery realism' (Sunday Times article). (Irrelevant but interesting note: Persephone Books has two friends called Meredith: Meredith Hooper has a programme on BBC Radio 3 tonight at 10.45. It is about the plight of penguins in the Antarctic. Meredith Ramsbotham is also a painter; we have the trompe-l'oeil she did for Dimanche and Other Stories on display in the shop – just ask to see it.)

2011-12-12T07:35:00.002Z

George Vernon Meredith Frampton (1894-1984), known as Meredith Frampton, was the son of the sculptor Sir George Frampton and the painter Christabel Cockerell. Only a handful of his paintings exist, fewer than by Vermeer: one reason was that his subjects 'had to be prepared to to sit for twelve sessions of a least two hours and to give him about a year to complete the picture' (Sunday Times article 1982), another was that he gave up painting in 1945 because of failing eyesight. He was then completely forgotten and was rediscovered by Richard Morphet of the Tate, who had long been fascinated by Portrait of a Young Woman 1935 (on display at Tate Modern) but knew nothing about the artist until he set about trying to organise a retrospective exhibition.

2011-12-09T06:51:00.001Z

So we have paid tribute to the people who died in the Bath Blitz, and tribute to the buildings that were destroyed. But this does not in any way excuse the depredations of the 1960s and 1970s, which is what Adam's book is all about. Nor was the 1960s destruction, and the terrible buildings that followed, at all necessary: in Warsaw, Cracow or Leipzig they build in replica and there is nothing wrong with that. There is no reason why (but we are being idealistic here) the worst of Bath's '60s buildings could not be demolished and replaced by the buildings that Adam is mourning in his book. The picture today shows preparations on the site of the Beaufort Hotel, now the Hilton, and shows that 'they' could just as easily have built terrace housing or in any case something more sympathetic than what they got: here.

2011-12-08T08:43:00.003Z

And there is another website about the Bath Blitz which is sobering to explore, it has all the statistics about what happened during the two nights of bombing, lists the people who died, and leads one to other sites, for example to Coleshill House (destroyed by fire in 1952) which was the headquarters for CART, the British Resistance. The photograph above is the Spetisbury Auxiliary Unit Patrol based in Blandford Forum. We may giggle a bit nowadays because of Dad's Army. But the bravery of the men in the photograph is inestimable. Does anyone know if there a novel about the men of CART?

2011-12-07T08:33:00.001Z

The photographs this week have been taken from Martin Wainwright's book The Bath Blitz, which he sent us as a friendly corrective to The Sack of Bath (we now have a few copies for sale in the shop). The picture today comes from his website.

2011-12-06T08:18:00.001Z

On those two nights 417 people were killed and 200 buildings of architectural or historical interest destroyed. This is Lansdown Place East. The photograph is on page 22 of The Bath Blitz by Martin Wainwright, more about this tomorrow.

2011-12-05T08:37:00.002Z

We try to make each week of the Persephone Post in some way relevant to our 96 books, thus last week's focus on studio potters was not only a small tribute to the four potters themselves but also an unspoken tribute to the Persephone mugs which are made especially for us by Annabel Munn (here is a picture of some of the mugs she sells to Primavera in Cambridge, the only other place in the UK where you can reliably buy them). This week it's back to 'lest we forget': sometimes we feel we need to ignore the domestic arts, romantic love, the art of fiction, writer's houses, grandmothers and remind ourselves of the worst that can happen. Adam Fergusson's The Sack of Bath is a crucial book in our list in that the destruction of buildings is even worse that forgetting women writers: once demolished a building has gone for ever, at least a book survives somewhere, even if inaccessibly. But did you realise how badly Bath was damaged in the blitz, on April 25th and 26th 1942? The photograph above shows Kingsmead Street the day after. It is now the site of Rosewell Court flats, which in years to come may itself be demolished and built more appropriately if the students at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture have their way.

2011-12-02T08:00:00.005Z

Since the publication of his family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes in 2010, Edmund de Waal has become a well known author, as well as being a celebrated ceramicist. The eponymous hare is one of a collection of netsuke, Japanese figurines that had been passed down through De Waal's family since the 1870s, and whose journey is described in the book. De Waal grew up in Canterbury, where he was taught pottery by Geoffrey Whiting. He later studied English at Cambridge and spent a year in Japan on a Daiwa Scholarship. See more of De Waal's most recent ceramics here and read more about how he came to write the memoir here.

2011-12-01T08:00:00.001Z

This is Lucie Rie (1902-1995) at work in Vienna around 1935, three years before she emigrated to London aged thirty six. In London she lived at 18 Albion Mews, where she converted the old stables into a pottery studio, later working closely with Hans Coper. She also taught at Camberwell School of Arts and was made a Dame in 1991. See more of Lucie Rie's delicate, Modern pottery here. Listen to critics on Lucie Rie's pottery here. Read Lucie Rie's obituary here.

2011-11-30T08:00:00.000Z

Michael Cardew was born in Wimbledon in 1901 and read Classics at Oxford before becoming Bernard Leach's first apprentice in St. Ives in 1923. He opened his own pottery in 1939 in St. Breward in Cornwall before accepting a teaching post in Africa in 1942, where he moved with his family and remained until 1948. He has been described as "one of the finest potters of the century". See Cardew's pots at the Tate and at the V&A.

2011-11-29T08:00:00.001Z

Bernard Leach (1887-1979) was born in Hong Kong and spent his childhood in Japan and England. In 1911, after returning to Japan with his first wife, he was introduced to raku by his friend Tomimoto Kenkichi and decided to work exclusively on ceramics. He eventually settled in Cornwall in 1920, where he set up his own pottery. See Bernard Leach's pots at the Tate or online here.

2011-11-28T08:00:00.001Z

This week's Post will look at the work of twentieth-century British studio potters. But first a brief look at what influenced the 'father' of British studio pottery, Bernard Leach. The Arts and Crafts Movement was championed by William Morris and John Ruskin, who focused on the importance of craftsmanship and the decorative arts as a reaction against industrial manufacture. This stained glass window was designed by Edward Burne Jones and made by Morris & Co. A detail of this window, which is in St James' Church in Staveley, Cumbria, was a Christmas 2009 second class stamp.

2011-11-25T08:14:00.001Z

Of the four Vermeers at the exhibition, three show women at a virginal. The Music Lesson c 1662 (The Royal Collection, Buckingham Palace) is very different from The Lacemaker because of its grand setting and, as The Arts Desk says, 'on this occasion no intimacy is invited between viewer and subject, because an intimacy is being forged between the two in the picture to which an audience may not be privy.'

2011-11-24T07:56:00.001Z

Grandmothers again: Woman at a Window, Waving at a Girl by Jacobus Vrei c 1650 Custodia Foundation, Paris

2011-11-23T07:50:00.003Z

The Vermeers are compelling but there are eight other artists in the exhibition. The Courtyard of a House in Delft c. 1658 by Pieter de Hooch (normally in the National Gallery, London) 'conveys a sense of tranquility and order in [its] modest domestic setting' (The Arts Desk); indeed it does.

2011-11-22T08:21:00.001Z

A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal c 1670 is normally at the National Gallery but is in Cambridge at the moment. The painting belonged to the art historian who 'discovered' Vermeer in the 1860s, and of course thinking about Vermeer prompts many thoughts about 'forgotten' painters, musicians (Schubert) – and writers. Especially neglected women writers.

2011-11-21T07:55:00.003Z

So there is an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge called Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence. The centrepiece is The Lacemaker c. 1670 which normally hangs at the Louvre; here is a page (scroll along to the right) which allows anyone who cannot get to Cambridge or, one day, to the Louvre to see the painting in its frame and how tiny it is – 21 cm across and 24 high, smaller than a sheet of A4. Here too is a page with extracts from some Vermeer art critics (inessential but interesting point: one of them is Lawrence Gowing, who was married to Julia Strachey).

Farrow and Ball Ointment Pink

2011-11-18T07:30:00.001Z

Dorset and a background of 'Ointment Pink' for some Staffordshire figures and antique mugs and jugs. Anyone feeling that they don't have enough mugs, jugs etc in their life should head for Gabor Cossa opposite the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge; and at the same time (rather aptly, as both shop and exhibition are havens of the domestic) should go to Vermeer's Women, more of this next week.

2011-11-17T06:14:00.001Z

'Book Room Red' in an attic bedroom in Kent. Red... A book room... A nursing chair... A fireplace in a bedroom... The only thing that is missing is a pile of Persephone books.

2011-11-16T06:18:00.001Z

The weaver's loft at the top of an early Georgian house in Spitalfields, painted in 'Pea Green'. The owner of this house recently bought every single Persephone book!

2011-11-15T08:36:00.001Z

Ben Pentreath's office, looking across Lamb's Conduit Street to his shop in Rugby Street. The walls are a pale stone colour called 'Clunch'.

2011-11-14T08:40:00.002Z

It's Farrow and Ball this week, pictures taken from Living with Colour by Ros Byam Shaw with photographs by Jan Baldwin. Here is a bedroom in a house in Sussex: we love the paint, obviously ('Great White'!), the lack of clutter on the table (difficult to achieve in normal life), the rug on the chair, the working shutters, the window seat with the chintz cushion, what's not to like...

2011-11-11T07:33:00.002Z

Today, ninety-three years after 11 a.m. on 11/11/1918, the UK has two minutes silence. In the shop our thoughts will be particularly with William in William - an Englishman and Julian in Julian Grenfell and, in the fifty books we wish we had published, with Roland Leighton in Testament of Youth.

2011-11-10T08:28:00.001Z

We put a wonderful portrait of Jacques Raverat (1885-1925), by his wife Gwen Raverat, illustrator of The Runaway, on page 18 of the Biannually. Here is a painting by Jacques himself. It is A Rest Beside the River and was sold at Bonham's two years ago © Private Collection.

2011-11-09T08:12:00.003Z

Harry Bush, who painted the picture on page 27 of the Biannually (Laggard Leaves), is known as the 'Painter of the Suburbs. December Sunshine again shows the artist's house in Queensland Avenue, Merton in 1925.

2011-11-08T07:40:00.004Z

Some people have commented that it's the first time we have had a child on the cover of the new Biannually and why is this? The answer is that it's very hard to find something that isn't kitsch, or verging on. However, the George Dunlop Leslie is a superb painting, miles from being kitsch. If you look at some more of his paintings here some of them are a bit doubtful by that criterion. But this one, Pot Pourri 1874, is another fascinatingly domestic painting © Christie's/Private Collection/Bridgeman.

2011-11-07T08:37:00.003Z

This week: paintings related to the recent Persephone Biannually. Today an actual painting because alas it came out rather muted in the Biannually. This is not the printer's fault, it's because of the grey 'tint' that we use as a background on all the pages, but it's an issue to be addressed next year when we plan to have a redesign of the biannually and the catalogue (except whenever we mention this idea to anyone they say, if it ain't broke don't fix it). The newly-discovered Evelyn Dunbar, Girls Learning to Stook and Men Stooking, is on page 23 of the Biannually; it, and Evelyn Dunbar's life and work, will be discussed at an event at the shop tomorrow Tuesday from 6-8.

2011-11-04T08:00:00.000Z

Yosano Akiko (1878-1942) is one of Japan's most celebrated poets. She was also a feminist, contributing regularly to the monthly literary magazine Seito ('Bluestocking'), a mother of ten and the main breadwinner of her family. She took part in lively debates with other notable feminists within the pages of Seito, criticising social limitations on women. She was in turn criticised both for being too accommodating to her own husband and for setting a bad example to women from less privileged backgrounds by having so many children herself.

2011-11-03T08:00:00.001Z

Beate Sirota Gordon was born in Vienna in 1923 and moved to Tokyo aged six with her mother and father, a concert pianist and piano teacher. Beate lived in Tokyo for ten years before moving to the USA to attend college. When war broke out she was separated from her parents but returned to Japan as soon as the war ended to find her parents, who had been put under house arrest. She was the first civilian woman to arrive in Japan after the war and since she could speak Japanese fluently she worked for the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers as a translator. It was Beate Sirota Gordon who ensured that legal equality between men and women was written into the postwar Japanese Constitution. Her memoirs are available here.

2011-11-02T08:00:00.000Z

This is a 1914 advertisement for the in-house magazine ('Hanatsubaki') of Japanese cosmetics company Shiseido. This is the kind of ad that would have been directed at women like Tomo in The Waiting Years and Mary in The Ginger Tree. Shiseido was established in 1872 and remains one of the most successful cosmetics companies in Japan today. It has had a profound influence on Japanese concepts of feminine beauty and consumer culture. See the amazing image archive made available by M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and read the enlightening essay by Gennifer Weisenfeld to accompany the images here.

2011-11-01T08:00:00.003Z

The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd was first published in 1977. If you haven't already read this extraordinary novel you must. It is written in diary form and charts the experiences of Mary MacKenzie, a young Scottish woman, as she travels to China to marry a British military attache in 1903. Eventually, circumstances demand that she moves alone to Tokyo. Oswald Wynd describes early twentieth-century Japan as seen from a foreign woman's perspective with total assurance. The Ginger Tree is also firmly among "the fifty books we wish we had published."

2011-10-31T11:10:00.000Z

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.

2011-10-28T07:59:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-27T07:58:00.000+01:00

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

2011-10-26T07:50:00.002+01:00

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.

2011-10-25T20:05:00.000+01:00

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.

2011-10-24T19:00:00.000+01:00

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.

2011-10-21T08:10:00.003+01:00

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.

2011-10-20T09:05:00.002+01:00

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.'

2011-10-19T07:33:00.002+01:00

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.

2011-10-18T09:58:00.002+01:00

Karen Blixen's desk at Rungsted, Denmark.

2011-10-17T06:52:00.002+01:00

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.

2011-10-14T07:04:00.004+01:00

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!

2011-10-13T08:03:00.003+01:00

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.

2011-10-12T06:26:00.004+01:00

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.

2011-10-11T07:16:00.002+01:00

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.

2011-10-10T07:32:00.002+01:00

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.'

2011-10-07T05:53:00.001+01:00

'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.'

2011-10-06T07:19:00.003+01:00

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.

2011-10-05T05:46:00.003+01:00

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.

2011-10-04T08:21:00.002+01:00

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).

2011-10-03T05:28:00.002+01:00

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.

2011-09-30T07:30:00.003+01:00

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.'

2011-09-29T07:56:00.002+01:00

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.

2011-09-28T08:17:00.005+01:00

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.'

2011-09-27T06:51:00.004+01:00

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).

2011-09-26T06:58:00.003+01:00

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.

2011-09-23T07:39:00.002+01:00

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.)

2011-09-22T07:40:00.003+01:00

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.

2011-09-21T07:31:00.003+01:00

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.

2011-09-20T07:37:00.004+01:00

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).

2011-09-19T07:20:00.004+01:00

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.

2011-09-16T05:17:00.002+01:00

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.

2011-09-15T08:09:00.003+01:00

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.

2011-09-14T07:25:00.003+01:00

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.'

2011-09-13T07:41:00.002+01:00

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.

2011-09-12T08:47:00.005+01:00

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.

2011-09-09T07:53:00.003+01:00

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.

2011-09-08T07:14:00.003+01:00

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).

2011-09-07T06:00:00.004+01:00

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.