This lithograph, which hangs above the desk in the shop, is on the current Persephone Letter so will be familiar to most readers of the Post – but because it is so familiar to us and so thought-provoking it can bear a second outing. This ammunitions worker in the First World War was shielding her lungs from chemicals. But how successfully?
Barbara Hepworth drew The Hands 1948 – although in 2020 it’s the masks we notice as much as the hands. The Hepworth in Wakefield writes here: ‘Following the hospitalisation of their daughter Sarah in 1944, Hepworth and her husband, the artist Ben Nicholson, struck up a friendship with Norman Capener, the surgeon who treated Sarah at the Princess Elizabeth Orthopaedic Hospital in Exeter. Through this friendship, Hepworth was invited to witness a variety of surgical procedures at Exeter and the London Clinic. Over a two-year period, 1947–9, Hepworth produced around 80 works within the series. As well as pencil, ink and chalk drawings, many were executed in both pencil and oil paint on board [as was The Hands]. Impressed by the close connection she felt between her art and the skilled craftsmanship of the surgeon, Barbara Hepworth was particularly fascinated by the rhythmic movement of hands during the medical procedures unfolding before her.’ There is a book about The Hospital Drawings by Nathaniel Hepburn, available from the Hepworth.
On the Post this week: masks; these are going to become a crucial part of our everyday lives over the next few weeks. This picture was in the Observer yesterday. It’s a group of Californians in 1918. And it may be frivolous to say this, but look at their clothes, the women especially. If Margaret Howell or Toast flashed these coats into our inboxes, and the shoes, we would be delighted. Also the men are rather dapper. Apologies for the triviality. In fact this week’s task is making masks out of Persephone fabric. We were going to sell them in the shop for £1 but are now wondering whether in fact the shop will remain closed for several weeks. Alas.
Perhaps the most famous of Virginia Woolf’s dogs was Pinka, a black cocker spaniel from a litter born to Pippin, Vita Sackville-West’s cocker spaniel. Pinka was given to the Woolfs by Vita.
‘Our’ author Elizabeth von Arnim wrote a book about all the dogs she had owned called All the Dogs of my Life. It opens: ‘I would like, to begin with, to say that although parents, husbands, children, lovers, and friends are all very well, they are not dogs. In my day and turn having been each of the above – except that instead of husbands I was wives – I know what I am talking about, and am well acquainted with the ups and downs, the daily ups and downs, the sometimes hourly ones in the thin-skinned, which seem inevitably to accompany human loves. Dogs are free from these fluctuations. Once they love, they love steadily, unchangingly, till their last breath. That is how I like to be loved. Therefore I will write of dogs. Up to now I have had fourteen, but they weren’t spread over my life equally, and for years and years at a time I had none. This, when first I began considering my dogs, astonished me; I mean, that for years and years I had none. What was I about, I wondered, to allow myself to be dogless? How was it that there were such long periods during which I wasn’t making some good dog happy?” (It is now fourteen years since the last Persephone dog, Sasha, a Cavalier King Charles, died, and we can’t believe it has taken us so long to decide to get another dog!)
This is Gilbert’s ancestor nearly 500 years ago, in 1529 to be precise, seen here with Federico il Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua.
Flush, Virginia Woolf’s ‘biography’ of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, is the most charming, fascinating and original book imaginable, no wonder it was a huge bestseller when published (rather to Virginia’s dismay). Our edition also has a brilliant preface by Sally Beauman showing that the repression of Elizabeth Barrett by her father was an act of grotesque patriarchal dominance disguised as kindness. This is Elizabeth’s 1843 drawing of her beloved companion.
Some readers of the Post may remember that in order to cheer ourselves up after three years of Brexit beastliness we decided to get an office dog! Well, he was born on Easter Monday and we shall call him Gilbert, partly after Gilbert in Anne of Green Gables/Anne with an E (which made the first three weeks of lockdown almost a joy), partly after the goldfish in the Rosamunde Pilcher short story in The Second Persephone Book of Short Stories, and partly because it has Proustian/French/European overtones. So this week on the Post – dogs with literary associations. First up of course Jane Carlyle’s Nero who is thought to have been a Havanese like Gilbert. (Nero can be seen again on the endpaper of The Carlyles at Home.)
E M Forster saw Hampstead as something he in some senses despised and in some senses envied. Of Maurice (the novel that was not published in his lifetime which he wrote in 1910-12) the late Peggy Jay, the ‘queen of Hampstead’, would write that his description of the ‘“Hampstead” family, particularly the daughters, are a mirror image of my own’. She was one of the children of the Garnett family, then living at 21 Well Walk, and for Forster it came to represent the paradigm of family life, the family life he would never have (because of his mother and because of his sexuality) and of Englishness. It was Peggy Jay’s aunt, Hilda Garnett, who inspired Adela Quested in Forster’s final novel A Passage to India. There are many parallels between the real Hilda and the fictional Adela, who, like Hilda, lived in Hampstead, ‘an artistic and thoughtful little suburb of London’ and is familiar with ‘advanced academic circles, deliberately free’.
Elizabeth Jenkins bought number 8 Downshire Hill in 1939 and lived there for fifty years, before moving to a retirement home and living to the age of 104. She was the author of thirteen novels and thirteen biographies and some of them are among the most important books of the C20th – her biographies of Jane Austen and Elizabeth the First are outstanding and so are some of her novels, in particular The Tortoise and the Hare and Harriet. The former is about a QC married to the beautiful but passive Imogen who has to watch her husband being wrenched away from her by the appalling but strangely charismatic Blanche, while Harriet is loosely based on the 1877 Penge murder and although rather horrifying (Harriet is basically starved to death by her family in order that they should inherit her fortune) it is so magnificently and subtly written that the delicacy of the prose obliterates the horrifying aspects.