The novelist May Sinclair was 35 when she moved to number 13, now number 17 Christchurch Hill, in the autumn of 1898. She lived here until the spring of 1906 when she moved a few yards down the hill to 8 Willow Road.  And it was in the house in Willow Road that she wrote The Creators, published in 1910. It asks two perennial questions a) can a woman be a good wife and a good novelist at one and the same time, and b) can two writers ever hope to live together happily? She describes Tanqueray, who lodges at number 1 Christchurch Hill.  ‘For the last week he had been what he called settled at Hampstead… He had chosen the house because it stood at a corner, in a road too steep for traffic. {That is poetic licence and May Sinclair may have been conflating this end of Christchurch Hill with, say, Holly Mount.} He had chosen his rooms because they looked on to a green slope with a row of willows at the bottom and a row of willows at the top, and because, beyond the willows, he could see the line of a low hill, pure and sharp against the sky. At sunset the grass of his slope turned to a more piercing green and its patches of brown earth to purple.’ (The Creators is  high up on our list of Possibly Persephone’s – if any reader of this Post has read it and admires it as much as we do, please write and tell us if they too think it should be reprinted. )

Why did  so many women writers live in Hampstead? Several reasons: they could walk on the Heath; there’s the beauty of the village; and there’s the distance from the smoke and grime of ‘town’; and yet of course after 1907 there was the accessibility by underground. But also there is what Hampstead means metaphorically. It only has to be mentioned for people to think they know what it implies. On 3 December 1917 Leonard Woolf gave a lecture at Hampstead. Virginia Woolf went with him. She wrote in her diary: ‘Strange what a stamp Hampstead sets even on a casual gathering of 30 people, such clean, decorous, uncompromising & high minded old ladies & old gentlemen; & the young wearing brown clothes, & thinking seriously, the women dowdy, the men narrow shouldered; bright fire & lights & books surrounding us, & everyone of course agreeing beforehand to what was said’; on 15 November 1919, three weeks before, she had been to tea with Margaret Llewelyn Davies at 26 Well Walk in the ‘immaculate & moral heights of Hampstead’ (that would have been a good title for the Hampstead women writers talk); and on another occasion visiting the same friend, in September 1927, she wrote about: ‘All Hampstead, red, sanitary, earnest, view gazing, breeze requiring.’

There is a new book about Hampstead artists in the 1930s, with an extract in the Observer here about Barbara Hepworth. What a pity the book doesn’t cover the writers and in particular the women writers! Well, it reminded us that we have the notes for a talk/lecture we have given a few times called Hampstead Women Writers and on the Post this week we shall reproduce a few extracts from it.  ‘Several times during 1918 and 1919 Virginia Woolf travelled up to Hampstead to see Katherine Mansfield at 17 East Heath Road, her home between August 1918 and the summer of 1920. Katherine wrote: “This is simply the most divine spot. So remote, so peaceful; if only one could live up here for a really long time and not have to see anybody… It might very well be France, it’s much more like France than it is like England.”’

A Ceanothus (what a beautiful word) is the next best thing to a wisteria – order one now, plant it  virtually anywhere (they are very hardy) and in five years time it will be a splendid and very blue reminder of lockdown. (What will we call this strange period in the future? Will we refer to it as 2020? Or the virus year? Or the Coronavirus? Or the Covid lockdown? Os simply lockdown? Who knows.) This ceanothus is £20 from the ever-reliable Crocus here.

Wisteria is a crucial part of late April/early May but alas, this year, those of us who are completely locked down may miss seeing one, or breathing in the scent of the flowers (which is unlike anything else). Here is a wisteria to buy from Gardening Express in the UK; and for those who are allowed a walk in their neighbourhood there is usually one to be gazed at – for example, for North Londoners, there is a spectacular wisteria on the house in Delancey Street, Camden Town that was once lived in by Elizabeth Jane Howard, indeed maybe she planted it. This is a photograph taken eight years ago and it is just as amazing now!

At the moment you can buy courgette seeds from Sarah Raven – here, for delivery in early May. If the post is working (we were sent some yeast two and a half weeks ago but it has yet to appear. Luckily flat bread and soda bread are proving peculiarly delicious.)

Apologies that this post is so late (although many readers of the Post will not notice, being abroad). But it is very hard to be in the rhythm of uploading the Post first thing every morning when the morning itself has no rhythm. However, here we are, and the good news is that Lydia is in the shop today starting to catch  up on orders (330 of them) which have been stalled since lockdown happened.  Then Maud and Emily will continue the task and in a week or two we should ‘catch up’. We are hoping to be back in the office as normal in May and to reopen the shop in June. But who knows: we are watching Spain’s slow return to work with interest and anxiety. On the Post this week: flowers that we would like to plant but are sold out! So all we can do is gaze wistfully at the pictures. These are sweet peas from Marshall’s.

And finally, some tulips which do actually look the tulips in our garden: Tulips in a Pewter Tankard by Jane Elizabeth Wheelwright (1876-1957). Happy Easter to every reader of the Post and fingers crossed that Easter Monday will bring better news. Personally, we are optimistic that the lockdown will slowly start to be lifted. This is because the person with whom I’m in isolation is good at maths and statistics and he explains why the figures are not as bad as they seem. But maybe this is misplaced optimism she says as she reaches for another hot cross bun, a present from a neighbour. For there are many, many blessings to count and we are busy counting them. Let us never forget, us fortunate people who can obsess about tulips and munch hot cross buns and moan because they can’t see their friends and family: millions and millions are far, far worse off and we must hope and pray that things will improve for them. We Persephone readers are basically fine and need no sympathy. But empathy we have in abundance and we send every empathetic thought.

These tulips were painted by the nicely named  Rose Mead (1867-1948) in 1930. Here is her Wikipedia entry, she sounds an admirable person and what a wonderful detail this is: ‘During [her time at the Westminster School of Art in the 1890s] she painted herself cooking at a stove. A company that made similar cookers offered £500 (£39k in 2007, by now £45k) to add their name, an amount she refused because she was unwilling to “prostitute” her art.’

Early Seventeenth Century Holland: Ambrosius Bosschaert Tulips in a Wan-Li Vase c 1619. This painting is now going on the Persephone Books Instagram ‘feed’. Some of the readers of the Post may not ‘do’ Instagram but really it is so worth doing and now that we all have so much time, there are instructions on the web about how to download it, you can choose who to ‘follow’ and we heavily recommend it. If you go to @fransbookshop for example, you will be able to enjoy a Dorothy Whipple short story being read today at 11 (“Elevenses with Fran’) UK time. The short story is ‘Boarding House’ and this is what we wrote on The Closed Door and Other Stories page:  ‘There is an intimacy in Dorothy Whipple’s writing. but naturally this intimacy does not appeal to everyone. We feel that it appeals to people who like Elizabeth Taylor and yet this is not always the case: we have a friend who adores Elizabeth Taylor but cannot love Dorothy Whipple (yes, there are people).Yet one cannot but suspect that the younger novelist learnt a great deal from Dorothy Whipple. Take the short story in Every Good Deed and Other Stories called ‘Boarding House’ (written in about 1940, just when Elizabeth Taylor was beginning her career as a writer). It is about a rather deplorable woman called Mrs Moore who ruins things for everyone else when she arrives at a small hotel – because she is bored and lonely. ‘“It’s cutlet for cutlet,” she thought bitterly. “I can’t entertain, so no one entertains me now. To think that I should have to come to a place like this. After the life,” she thought, “I’ve lived.”’ The last sentence is pure Elizabeth Taylor. A lesser writer would have put ‘After the life I’ve lived,’ she thought. Why it is funnier and so much more expressive to put ‘she thought’ in the middle of the sentence is a mystery; but it makes all the difference. And why ‘It’s cutlet for cutlet’ is funny is also a mystery, but it certainly is.’