From my Study Window by Thomas Burke c. 1939. What a magnificent view! If this is a woman novelist looking out of the window, we are all cheering her on. She is obviously deep in thought, but there is a mysterious absence of the clutter which surrounds most writers. Nb. a reader wrote to us about the first post this week to say: ‘Expect you already knew that the Window Tax was the origin of the phrase “daylight robbery”?’ We didn’t, so thank you.
Leonard Woolf by Trekkie Parsons 1950, a painting which is still at Monk’s House. Leonard’s extraordinary novel The Wise Virgins is full of windows, albeit of a different kind.
Inspired by last month’s Forum (soon to be renamed the Persephone Perspective by the way) this week on the Post – windows. The direct inspiration was the way the final image for the Forum write-up of There Were No Windows was of – windows, but they are bricked up. Here is the explanation: ‘William III was in a financial crisis in 1696 due to the wars with Ireland and on the continent. One new idea that was brought in to help pay for the debt was the unpopular window tax. The tax was payable on houses of more than six windows, so the clever tax-dodgers simply got hold of a builder to brick up the other windows. Houses with nine windows would pay 2/- (10p) and ten to nineteen windows the cost was 4/- (20p). In 1851 the window tax was scrapped and a new tax called house duty a forerunner to community charge became payable.’ The mystery is why homeowners didn’t put back the windows after 1851. Obviously they often did but even today you can see Georgian and Victorian houses with bricked up windows. And of course the image at the end of the Forum piece was symbolic – there were no windows any more. This painting is by Charles Ginner, it’s 1943 and t’s called Spring Day at Boscastle. (The war was raging in Europe but ‘somewhere in England’ people were reading books and putting daffodils in jugs and looking peacefully out of the window.)
And here is the final photograph. What an incredible record. It is a long way from being a novel in that we know nothing about the sisters, apart from their names – Heather, Mimi, Bebe and Laurie (Bebe is Nicholas Nixon the photographer’s wife) – but still one keeps comparing the pictures with fiction because ‘as we come to the last pictures, we feel the final inevitability that, as Nixon says, “Everyone won’t be here forever”‘ (Susan Minot in the New York Times). Yet, unlike in fiction, ‘the sisters’ privacy has remained of utmost concern to the artist, and it shows in the work. Year after year, up to the last stunning shot with its triumphant shadowy mood, their faces and stances say, Yes, we will give you our image, but nothing else.’
This is 2002. They all four look beautiful but weary: they are presumably all super-busy with jobs and children and relationships and houses – and life.
Now it’s 1994 and here is an article in Elle which helps to define why we find these photographs so mesmerising. It’s because ‘the images are closer to invoking the actual experience of being a woman—being a sister, a wife, a mother, a daughter—than most one-dimensional pictures can’. (Oops, is there something wrong with the grammar? But the point is well made.) It’s the same reason we read fiction of course. They Were Sisters anyone? In novels, as in these photographs, ‘it is not actually vanity that we are ultimately faced with, but the all too brief duration of life. Not only do we change, age, grow old, and one day die—but we do so as suddenly as the eye can sweep between forty still-life portraits.’
‘Who are these sisters? We’re never told (though we know their names: from left, Heather, Mimi, Bebe and Laurie; Bebe, of the penetrating gaze, is Nicholas Nixon’s wife)’ writes Susan Minot (whose novels are definitely among ‘the fifty books we wish we had published’ on our shop table) in an excellent piece about the photographs in the New York Times here. This is 1986.
Many Persephone readers, especially American ones, will be familiar with the forty photographs of The Brown Sisters by Nicholas Nixon, but until they were published in the Financial Times two weeks ago none of us in the shop had seen them. The photographs, which were on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until last week and have now been published in a book, show the four sisters in the same pose every year. Today: 1975.
In the office we thought it would have been better if the new Charlie Hebdo cover had had images of (an older) Christ, the Buddha, a Greek Orthodox Patriarch, an orthodox Jew – as well as Mohammad – all of them saying Tout est pardonné. But perhaps we Brits can’t really understand French satire. Wonderful of the Muslim Association of Great Britain to say: ‘Muslims should react in the same way as our prophet – with calmness, grace and the best of manners.’ Very well put. Live and let live.
Friends and relations of the Parisians murdered in the Jewish supermarket.