Archives: Persephone Post

This photograph is ancestral – but what is so sobering is how little is known about one’s quite-near relations. The Hayward family lived in Japan at the time of the great earthquake of 1923, and survived it. But why they were in Japan is a mystery lost in the mists of time. Norma, the little girl, who was born in 1917, went on to have two sons, nine grandchildren and now numerous great-grandchildren, none of whom will know anything about their ancestor. We must write things down before it is too late. (The great novel about women’s lives in Japan is The Waiting Years by Fumiko Enchi. We tried to reprint it ourselves but with no success, however Vintage are doing it next year so at least it will be in print. There is also The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd which we sell in the shop as one of the ‘fifty books we wish we had published’ and are constantly recommending to people.)

Duncan Grant painted Tulips in a Decorated Jug in 1960: and perhaps the decorated table is still at Charleston where he lived, standing in front of a grey door.

It’s a Bank Holiday in the UK and the shop is closed – so the Persephone staff are lying on sofas or in deck chairs (the former at the moment but maybe the sun will come out later) reading a good book: Madame Solario in anticipation of next year’s republication and a novel by Susan Tweedsmuir, John Buchan’s wife, as lent by Elizabeth Buchan (a relation by marriage), rather good  so far. And for a bit of timelessness: St Albans Abbey.

This painting of Ipomoea (morning glory) is taken from a young woman’s (unpublished) late nineteenth-century sketch book we keep in the shop. It consists of watercolours of flowers and butterflies which we have had on the post before – but here is a reprise.

One of our most favourite authors, even though we are not allowed to have favourites. This must be post 1939 when The Hopkins Manuscript came out. But where is Greengates (1936) which we publish this autumn? Maybe out of sight on the right. The Fortnight in September is of course one of bestsellers. (And we are planning a couple more Classics. Should Fortnight be one of them?)

A poster that we rather like (and, no, we don’t have it in the shop) even though it raises rather complex moral questions. The Corps lasted from 1917-1921: over 57,000 women served between January 1917 and November 1918.

We have had Ambrose Heath‘s Good Food on the Aga in print for many years and have sold several thousand copies. For the sake of consistency we did not use its original frontispiece (and slightly regret this as it’s so beautiful).  Faber have just published a facsimile of Good Food.

No special theme on the Persephone Post for the next couple of weeks, instead ten Persephone-related ‘oddments’ that we love. Today: The First Place 1860 by Erwood, it’s at the Geffrye Museum and was purchased in 2008 with the help of the excellent Art Fund (which we support). They wrote: ‘She has been sweeping the hearth (or carpet) using a dustpan and brush. The title indicates the source of her unhappiness – she is overcome with the difficulties of her first position, away from her own home and family. It provides an accurate and detailed view of a mainstream middle-class home. It is also unusual because its subject is a servant’s experience. The experience of servants has tended to be overlooked by historians and they are under-represented in the museum’s galleries.’ And this was from the Sotheby’s catalogue when the painting was sold in 2008: ‘The painter of this tender genre subject is known only as the exhibitor of nine works – most if not all domestic of a similar type – at the Royal Academy between 1860 and 1869. These works were sent from addresses in London. A work entitled The Rejected Picture, shown in 1861 and which may be guessed to have been based on his own experience, suggests that Erwood struggled to gain professional recognition. The present work was the artist’s first exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1860. Although recording a moment in time in a manner typical of much Victorian painting of this date, the execution and setting of the work is in some ways very modern. It is an intriguing vision into the current interiors of the 1860s, much of the furniture being near contemporary and very much the fashion at this date. The style of its execution, such as the play of light through the window and its painterly technique, also looks forward to British painting at the end of the nineteenth century.’

One of the Monuments Men, George Stout, constructed a pulley to lift Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna out of a salt mine in Austria before taking it to back to Belgium. This is such a touching photograph: the child with a cushion behind his head. (Who knew that Anne Olivier Bell, as Anne Popham, who was later to edit Virginia Woolf’s diaries, was among the 350 Monuments Men?)

Jacques Goudstikker was one of the extraordinary art dealers who would of course be in a book about all of them. Here is a long New York Times piece about him This notebook, with an alphabetical list of many of the 1,400 artworks he left behind  in Holland, was found on his body when he died in a tragic accident in May 1940. In 2010 his granddaughter gave an excellent lecture about her grandfather and the struggle to recover the looted artwork from the Dutch government here: it is rather mesmerising.