Archives: Persephone Post

The Gentle Author, who writes the extraordinary blog called Spitalfields Life (don’t miss the pictures of blossom trees two days ago) has published another book. Spitalfields Nippers consists of photographs by the amateur photographer Horace Warner at the turn of the last century. What word can one use of them? Unforgettable? Touching? Heartrending? Perhaps there isn’t one. We’ll have five pictures on the Post this week, and the book in stock at the shop. This photograph is of Joey Lyons and Nellie Stark. Joey was born in 1896, worked as a boot finisher from the age of 14, and died in Suffolk in 1967.

Studio 1989 won the Mosman Art Prize. Here are the details of The Woodblock Paintings of Cressida Campbell which has had four limited editions but is now an unaffordable collectors’ item. Maybe someone, somewhere has ac copy  in the UK.. But here is a set of beautiful boxed cards. .

The Washing Up 1989 is a woodblock. Cressida Campbell’s normal technique is woodblock painting, which is explained here. The Persephone reader who lives in Sydney and originally wrote to us about her said: “We went to hear Cressida being interviewed by one of the curators at the State Art Gallery. I was fascinated to hear her description of how she created her works. I love hearing how writers work, too, and her process had a lot in common with writing. She spoke about ‘editing’ and re-editing her work until the bones were apparent. She even saws into her finished woodblocks sometimes to create a smaller, tighter picture. And Nasturtiums is one of those. Her mother calls it ‘murdering her darlings’.”

Apologies there was no Post yesterday. The stress of continuing jet lag; the website going down (the explanation was ‘a rogue file on the server that we did not put there’, aargh) and getting the new Biannually to the printer (it has gone and will be sent out on April 20th) means that we actually forgot the Post Or perhaps subconsciously we are civil servants (in the UK they get the Tuesday after the Bank Holiday as extra holiday – correction by the time the shop opened at 10 – apparently they are all hard at work and getting the Tuesday is a thing of the past!). The plan was that this week we would focus on a wonderful Australian painter called Cressida Campbell. But now she will be short-changed. Well, we shall make it up in other places (Facebook for example). It was a Persephone reader in Australia who alerted us to Nasturtiums 2002, she knew we would like it and indeed we love it. It’s particularly timely as the sunshine in the UK means that we are all beginning to think about seed packets.

Ethel Wilson was one of Canada’s greatest novelists and Persephone Books is proud to be the publisher of Hetty Dorval. There is a rather good piece about her by Faye Hammill (who has also written about Miss Pettigrew in her book Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History) here.

Carol Shields (1935-2003) lived in several different places in Canada but was  in Victoria during the last two years of her life. Her family has set up an excellent website, and the reading suggestions for book groups are particularly good. This photograph was taken in 1979 in Vancouver when Carol Shields was teaching creative writing at the university.

Francis Rattenbury’s architecture is celebrated throughout Victoria (he designed Government House, the Imperial Hotel, and several other imposing buildings)  as is Emily Carr‘s painting and writing: there is a prominent statue of her, and the house where she lived and worked is firmly on the tourist’s must-see list. Here is a video describing the inside of the house.

Persephone Books is (temporarily, until Wednesday) in British Columbia and on the Post this week: Canadian women writers. First of all, a distant relation Alma Rattenbury: born Alma Clarke at Kamloops on the Thompson River in 1895,  ‘she showed great musical ability early on. So gifted was she that at the age of 18 she played two different concertos with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. She was also a composer of songs [here she is playing one]. In 1914 she married Caledon Dolling, who was killed two years later at the Battle of the Somme. She herself served as a war nurse: she joined the French Red Cross and, as an ambulance driver, her courage in the face of enemy fire was outstanding. She was wounded twice and decorated with France’ s highest medal for gallantry, the Croix de Guerre. After the war she married Thomas Pakenham (Coldstream Guards 1914-22). A son Christopher was born, but the marriage ended disastrously. She moved to Vancouver, and resumed her concert career. It was at one of her concerts, in Victoria, that she met her third husband, the architect Francis Rattenbury’ (Victoria Library archive). Alas, Alma became notorious in 1935 when, in England, her husband was murdered by her lover, George Stoner; he was found guilty but soon after the trial Alma, unable to live with what had happened, killed herself.

And finally a 1548 portrait that’s in Cologne (anyone there who can go and check for us that it’s on display?): this painting of a girl at a virginal is either a self-portrait or a depiction of Catharina’s sister Christina. Again the focus on the face, on the velvet sleeves and the beautiful hands.

‘Portrait of a Child, small three-quarter-length, in a white embroidered dress lined with lace and a cap, holding a bird dated and inscribed 1559′ (Christie’s catalogue). But the date seems to contradict Tuesday’s Post, which asserted that Catharina van Hemessen never painted again after her marriage in 1554. This painting is only attributed to her; so let’s  imagine that it is definitely by her, that she had a child in 1555 and this four year-old boy is hers.