The Persephone Post

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 08:05:00 +0000

And we cannot end this week of Renaissance portraits without the Botticelli workshop Portrait of a Young Lady c. 1476, allegedly Simonetta Vespucci (but Persephone readers wouldn't be at all surprised to see her holding a pomegranate). Here is another good piece about the exhibition, this time from the Global Dispatches.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 08:17:00 +0000

Portrait of a Woman c 1440, normally at the Friedsam Collection, may be by Paolo Uccello. The Daily Beast has a slideshow of more of the portraits here.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:58:00 +0000

Of all the 150 paintings, drawings, medals and busts, Filippo Lippi's Portrait of a Man and a Woman at a Casement c 1440 © Metropolitan Museum of Art is in some ways the most timeless.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 08:09:00 +0000

Portrait of Giuliano de' Medici c. 1478 by Botticelli was in the Renaissance Faces exhibition when it was at the Bode Museum in Berlin, it is now in New York and is normally to be seen at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The Berlin catalogue observes: 'Portraits have become commonplace today, but between the 5th and 15th century independent portraits of individual people were rare and the exclusive reserve of rulers and historic figures': reminding us that an interest in ordinariness is a relatively modern construct and was roughly paralleled by the rise of the novel in the C18th.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 08:50:00 +0000

There is a magnificent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York called The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini. Here is Portrait of a Young Lady c. 1465 by Antonio del Pollaiuolo.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Jessica Tandy (1909-1994) was born at 58a Geldeston Road in Upper Clapton. She was enrolled in drama school as a teenager and made her first appearance on stage at 16. In 1947 she played Blanche DuBois in the Broadway production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire alongside Marlon Brando. She was not re-cast as Blanche in Elia Kazan's 1951 film however; she continued to work in theatre rather than in film, with the exception of her appearance in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds in 1963. It was not until she was in her seventies that she began to enjoy Hollywood success, appearing in films such as Driving Miss Daisy (1989) for which she won a British Film award, an Oscar and a Golden Globe.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 08:00:00 +0000

The first blue plaque in Hackney commemorating a woman in her own right (rather than as a wife, as in the case of Catherine Booth, wife of the founder of the Salvation Army) was at 55 Graham Road, where popular music hall singer, Marie Lloyd (1870-1922), lived. Lloyd was known for her risque songs, double-entendre and suggestive gestures. She was hugely successful but died in 1922 three days after collapsing on stage. 100, 000 people attended her funeral in Hampstead. Read more about Marie Lloyd here (page 25).

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Edith Cavell (1865-1915) worked in St. Leonard's Hospital on Kingsland Road. She later became matron of a teaching hospital in Belgium where she helped to establish the Belgian nursing service. During the First World War she was involved in the Resistance, sheltering English and Belgian prisoners during the battles of Mons and Charleroi. She was shot by a German firing squad in 1915. Below the statue of Edith Cavell that now stands in St. Martin's Place near Trafalgar square is the inscription: "Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone."

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Perhaps the most famous of Hackney's women is Mary Wollestonecraft (1759-1797), who set up a school in Newington Green in 1783. To commemorate her life and work, The Newington Green Action Group is currently raising funds in order to erect a sculpture of her there. Mary Wollestonecraft's 1792 'Vindication of the Rights of Woman' is a forerunner to the feminist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:00:00 +0000

On a trip to the lovely new Hackney Archives next to Dalston Junction station this weekend, Persephone stumbled upon a pamphlet dedicated to the famous women of Hackney. Once called "the first of our literary women" by Wordsworth, Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825) lived at 113 Church Street in Stoke Newington (there is now a plaque, under an advertisement for the Ideal Fountain Pen). She was a children's author, poet and essayist and her works include the 1791 poem 'Epistle to William Wilberforce Esq on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade' and the controversial 1812 poem 'Eighteen Hundred and Eleven'. Read more about Anna Laetitia's life in Hackney Today (scroll down to page 25).

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:57:00 +0000

The Flea Catcher is at the Musée Historique Lorrain in Nancy. Here is an unexpectedly good MA thesis about it by Crissy Bergeron.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:05:00 +0000

And the most amazing de la Tour of all - Le Tricheur (at the Louvre) 1635-40. (Apologies that Post comments are so brief this week, but the royalty statements – nearly done – are preoccupying. They are a chore. But leave us with a huge sense of triumph. Who would have thought that we could sell 10,000 copies of The Far Cry and counting?!)

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 07:20:00 +0000

A detail from Christ in the Carpenter's Shop at the Louvre, also c. 1645. There is extraordinary realism in this painting, you feel you would recognise the child anywhere – and it's so perfect that the fingernails silhouetted against the candle are slightly grubby. As they would have been in a carpenter's workshop.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 07:20:00 +0000

The Fortune Teller is at the Met in New York. It's 1630s and must have seemed absolutely incredible at the time – a novel in painting long before the novel had been invented.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:49:00 +0000

The Post was going to revert to its more traditional territory this week but it's been hard to leave Paris behind. So this week Georges de la Tour (1593-1692), a novelist or short-story writer manqué if ever there was one. The Newborn c. 1645 is at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rennes. It came to mind because of Episode 4 (a rather good one, they are variable) of Call the Midwife last night.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 08:27:00 +0000

So Persephone is back in the shop and now it's life as normal in the Lamb's Conduit Street quartier; plus royalty statements, the April books, decisions about the website (whether to make the great leap and change from 'static' to 'database driven' so that we could put up words and pictures whenever we liked; if we understood how to do it that is). But one can't leave Paris without Edith Piaf. Here is a 1961 recording of Non, je ne regrette rien. The pianist was Charles Dumont (b. 1929) who wrote the song with her – which is why he is so involved with every word and every chord.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 07:54:00 +0000

During the war and for ten years afterwards the novelist Colette lived at 9 rue de Beaujolais. There is a plaque now , and a passage leading through to the Palais Royal where, on the corner, there is the best toyshop in the world (here we once bought a replica of Babar which is still adored by all visiting children; and Babar, who has just turned 80, has an exhibition in his honour at the Museum of Arts Decoratif). This photograph of Colette and her husband comes from David Burke's Writers in Paris: the trees of the Palais Royal garden can be seen through the window.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:18:00 +0000

Nancy Mitford moved to a ground-floor flat in an eighteenth-century house in the Rue Monsieur in 1946 and here she lived until 1967 when she moved to Versailles. But some of The Pursuit of Love was written in Paris in 1945, and even though most of it is set in Gloucestershire, Oxford and London, it is still crucial reading for visitors to Paris – especially for anyone travelling to or from the Gare du Nord where Linda and Fabrice first meet. This is the opening page of the original manuscript; it is taken from the excellent Nancy Mitford website. (The Pursuit of Love is of course one of the fifty books we wished we had published and we always have it in stock in Lamb's Conduit Street.)

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 07:45:00 +0000

Someone should write a book one day about painters, artists, musicians etc who were ignored in their lifetime and later revered – it's a subject which fascinates in both directions eg that Schubert was not seen as a genius but the novelist Charles Morgan was, that Vermeer struggled to support his family but two million people (the whole of Paris) attended Victor Hugo's funeral. That's why the DNB instructs its contributors to assess their subject's reputation, and it's quite a tricky thing to do: when assessing EM Forster's one longed to put, of course he's the greatest novelist of the C20th, but since that's a minority opinion it can't go in the DNB (reminder: you can get it free with your local library card). Chopin does not fall into either the neglected or over-praised category, he was acclaimed as a genius from the start. Here is Pollini playing Nocturne no. 8 op. 27 no. 2. The watercolour was painted in 1836 by Maria Wodzinska, it can be seen at the Chopin Museum in Warsaw.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:01:00 +0000

This week on the Post: French painters and musicians who, in some indefinable way, have influenced our books. Berthe Morisot (1841-95) showed The Cradle, which hangs at the Musée d'Orsay, at the Impressionist exhibition of 1874 that included work by Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, Monet and Sisley; the painting failed to sell, and stayed in the artist's family until bought by the Louvre in 1930. One could draw all kinds of conclusions about domesticity in art; the dominance of male Impressionist painters; the subjects that were considered suitable for painters and writers – and those that were not; the fact that Morisot was not commercially successful in her lifetime. But let's just rejoice that 120 years after her death The Cradle draws the crowds.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 - 2000), is another Somerville College alumna, most famous for her 1979 Booker Prize winning novel Offshore. This bromide print was taken in 1999, and hangs in the National Portrait Gallery (© Jillian Edelstein / Camera Press). Fitzgerald was the niece of Persephone author Winifred Peck, and in the Times Literary Supplement in 1985 she stated: "if I could have back one of the many Winifred Peck titles I once possessed I would choose House-Bound" (Persephone Book No. 72), for which she wrote the preface. Penelope Fitzgerald began her literary career aged 58 with the publication of a biography of the Pre-Raphelite artist Edward Burne-Jones. She was included in a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945", printed by The Times in 2008.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Marghanita Laski was born in 1915 and read English at Somerville College after working in fashion. This 1968 photograph of her is at the National Portrait Gallery (© Estate of Jorge Lewinski). Laski was a novelist, journalist and radio panellist. She contributed thousands of entries to the Oxford English Dictionary. Some of the BBC broadcasts in which she was involved in the 1950s and '60s are available to view here; four of her novels, including the wonderful Little Boy Lost, can be found on our website.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

This picture of Margaret Kennedy was taken by Alexander Bassano and hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. Kennedy was a celebrated novelist and playwright and is best known for her 1924 novel The Constant Nymph, of which there are two film adaptations. The novel was supposedly inspired by painter Augustus John's family. Margaret Kennedy's life and work features in Susan J. Leonardi's book about earlier Somerville writers, Dangerous by Degrees.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Winifred Holtby met Vera Brittain at Somerville College. After an antagonistic beginning, the two women eventually became friends and lived together on Doughty Street (where there is now a blue plaque), just around the corner from the shop. Holtby interrupted her degree to join the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps in 1918 but resumed her studies at Oxford thereafter. Holtby was a novelist, feminist, socialist and social reformer. Her best-known novel South Riding was recently adapted by the BBC. Her 1924 novel The Crowded Street about a young woman trying to escape the limitations of provincial life is Persephone Book No. 76.

noreply@blogger.com (The Persephone Post) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

From Paris to Oxford this week. Here is a picture of the library loggia at Somerville College after it was converted into a hospital for convalescing soldiers during the First World War. Somerville was established as a women's college in 1879 and its alumnae include Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margaret Kennedy, all of whom went up between 1912-19. Vera Brittain volunteered as a V.A.D. nurse in 1915 and did not work in the library hospital but would have been familiar with scenes like this. Her memoir Testament of Youth is a powerful and honest account of the losses she endured during WWI. Read a review of it by Diana Athill here; Testament of Youth is firmly among the fifty books we wish we had published.