Jessica Dismorr is so fascinating that we have decided to devote this week on the Post to her and next week to ‘her contemporaries’. She had a nervous breakdown in 1920, her anguish possibly exacerbated by her experience as a war nurse. Books by Mary Borden, Cicely Hamilton (who wrote William in 1918 and couldn’t you imagine that you would have a nervous breakdown after writing it? Although CH didn’t in fact), Rebecca West and Vera Brittain leap to mind to explain this trauma. Here is JD in a 1926-7 self-portrait. What is there to say about those sad staring eyes?