Green VMCs and their Cover Art
CharlasVirago Modern Classics
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1BeyondEdenRock
The book covers are lovely, but the paintings really come alive when they are released from their green frames. Sometimes just a detail has been chosen, or the painting has been cropped because it wasn’t book-shaped. That may be the best way to make a good cover for a book, but it shouldn’t be the only way we see the art-work.
And so this is a thread to celebrate the books and the art that was carefully chosen to adorn them.
2BeyondEdenRock
'Madchen Mit Schurze' by Adolph Dietrich
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'Frost in May' by Antonia White (#1)
"Nanda Gray, the daughter of a Catholic convert, is nine when, in 1908, she goes to the Convent of the Five Wounds. Quick-witted, resilient and enthusiastic, she eagerly adapts to this closed world, learning rigid conformity and subjection to authority. Passionate friendships are the only deviation from her total obedience. Convent life - the smell of beeswax and incense; the petty cruelty of the nuns; the glamour and eccentricity of Nanda's friends - is perfectly captured. But this is much more than a school story; it is a lyrical account of the death of a soul."
3BeyondEdenRock
Springtime in Eskdale by James McIntosh Patrick
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Anderby Wold by Winifred Holtby (#65)
"Mary Robson is a young Yorkshire woman, married to her solid unromantic cousin, John. Together they battle to preserve Mary's neglected heritage, her beloved farm, Anderby Wold. This labour of love - and the benevolent tyranny of traditional Yorkshire ways - have made Mary old before her time. Then, into her purposeful life erupts David Rossitur, red-haired, charming, eloquent: how can she help but love him? But David is a young man from a different England, radical, committed to social change. As their confrontation and its consequences inevitably unfold, Mary's life and that of the calm village of Anderby are changed forever. "
4kaggsy
6kayclifton
7LyzzyBee
8Sakerfalcon
9BeyondEdenRock
>5 bleuroses: Some of the images will be familiar from those posts but I have many others that were in my waiting list
>6 kayclifton: I'm rereading 'Frost in May' at the moment and I completely agree with you.
>7 LyzzyBee: Yes. Most of the covers are cropped just a little but some of them are only a detail or a part of the whole, and the whole image can tell a very different story.
>8 Sakerfalcon: It was definitely branding done right, and I wouldn't have found my way from author to author without it. Most of the matches are good but there are a few that make me think that whoever did the choosing hadn't read the book.
10BeyondEdenRock
'And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur' by Leonora Carrington
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'The Seventh Horse & Other Tales' by Leonora Carrington (#326)
'From the land of Grimm, Lewis Carroll and Lear, from a place of shadows and glistening jewels come these tales: hallucinatory, hilarious, peopled with wolves, hyenas and giant white poodles. Since the first appearance of Leonora Carrington's stories in the late 1930s, a group of admirers has been tracking down the work which she herself, travelling continents and writing in three different languages, slougheed off like the skin of a snake. At last, her uncollected short fiction is bought together for the first time. Including such classics as "White Rabbits", "The Neutral Man", a story version of "The Stone Door", tales published in Mexican literary magazines, or previously unpublished, and many early French stories discovered amongst the papers of Max Ernst after his death, this spellbinding collection is for the surreal corners of everyone's heart.'
11BeyondEdenRock
A Peasant Girl by Martin Archer Shee
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'Without My Cloak' by Kate O'Brien (#233)
'When Anthony Considine creeps into Mellick town with a stolen horse in 1789, it sets the destiny of his family for decades to come. By the 1850s, through thrift and hard work, his son Honest John has made the Considines a leading Mellick family. In turn, his son Anthony builds a fine house in the country for his wife and children—most especially for his adored son Dennis. Little does he know that when Dennis grows up he will threaten the toil of generations with his love for a peasant girl. A stirring family saga of divided loyalties and individual freedom; of matches made and lost; and of the constraints of religion and family pride.'
12lippincote
13kaggsy
14LyzzyBee
15bleuroses
>11 BeyondEdenRock: Mary Lavelle was my first O'Brien and I've loved her ever since.
16kayclifton
Out of this world: the surreal art of Leonora Carrington / written by Michelle Markel ; illustrated by Amanda Hall
Markel, Michelle
17BeyondEdenRock
>13 kaggsy: I thought you would like that one.
>14 LyzzyBee: I think Leonora Carrington is the only one but I am not 100% certain.
>15 bleuroses: I still remember my first visit to a new library, years ago now, finding a little line of green Viragos all by Kate O'Brien. I read them all and then started looking for copies to keep.
>16 kayclifton: A great find!
18BeyondEdenRock
A Corner Of The Artist's Room In Paris by Gwen John
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'Journey to Paradise' by Dorothy Richardson (#321)
'Published together for the first time are Dorothy Richardson's short stories: delicate and slippery tales which range from the vast gardens of childhood and the anticipation of seaside holidays, to the shifts in perception as youth stutters towards maturity and on to the levelling experiences of old ages and death. Accompanying the range of fictional voices are her autobiographical sketches, offering insight into Dorothy Richardson's life and the development of her creative talent.'
19BeyondEdenRock
'Self-Portrait' by Louise Jopling
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'A Pin to See the Peepshow' by F Tennyson Jesse (#11)
"Julia Almond, born into drab suburban poverty in Edwardian London, longs for a better life, the fairy-tale world of romance she glimpsed in the toy peepshow of her childhood. She believes she is somebody special, always seeking - through her work, her conventional marriage and finally a young lover - the magic which will make her dreams come true. But these are peepshow fantasies. For Julia lives at a social level where convention and respectability - particularly for women - exert their most tyrannical hold. Julia cannot escape and in attempting to do so, she brings tragedy to herself and those who love her. "
20BeyondEdenRock
'Lady in the Yellow Hat' by Norman Lewis
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'The Living is Easy' by Dorothy West (#241)
'Cleo's marriage to Bart Judson is her ticket to higher things. Not for her the lifetime of hard work and poverty that her mother had known, or the invisibility which white society usually hands out to Black people. With Bart's money and her pale skin, Cleo intends to make use of the gifts in her favour - her "charming insincerity" and his generosity will see to that. Carefully manipulating the power which, since childhood, she has enjoyed in the face of others' weakness, she will stop at nothing to win a place for herself, her daughter and her sisters' children in Boston's Black society....'
21BeyondEdenRock
'The Belvedere' by John William Godward
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Cassandra by Christa Wolf (#315)
'Cassandra, daughter of the King of Troy, is endowed with the gift of prophecy but fated never to be believed. Troy has fallen, her father has been killed, and Cassandra is being taken back to Greece as booty by Agamemnon, King of Mycenae. There she knows that death awaits, and in a stream of memories, associations, reflections, Cassandra confronts her own history and comes to an understanding of her life in the patriarchal world and a recognition that in war there is no real difference between the conqueror and the conquered.'
22kaggsy
23kaggsy
24bleuroses
>23 kaggsy: I agree! Her gaze is so perfectly direct yet so seemingly innocent.
25LizzieD
26BeyondEdenRock
>23 kaggsy: >24 bleuroses: Agreed!
>25 LizzieD: It is lovely to see you here, Peggy. I have a good number of paintings lined up, so please sit back and enjoy them.
27BeyondEdenRock
'Marriage at Cana, Bride and Bridegroom' by Stanley Spencer
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'Our Spoons Came From Woolworths' by Barbara Comyns (#109)
"Sophia is twenty-one years old, she carries a newt around in her pocket and marries - in haste - a young artist called Charles. Swept into bohemian London of the thirties, Sophia is ill-equipped to cope: poverty, babies (however much loved) - and her husband - conspire to torment her. Hoping to add some spice to her life, Sophie takes up with the dismal, aging art critic, Peregrine and learns to repent her marriage - and affair - at leisure. Repentance brings an abrupt end to a life of unpaid bills, unsold pictures and unwashed crockery, plus the hope of joys in store."
28BeyondEdenRock
'Young Girl with Flowers' by Henri Lebasque
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'Saraband' by Eliot Bliss (#223)
"Louie, intense and solitary, lives in a dreamland of her own until the arrival of her gifted cousin Timothy. He brings her companionship, music, and "the long looked-for stimulation of the mind." But Tim and Louie are parted when she is sent to convent school, a closed world of prayer and order, and of lasting, passionate friendships. Then comes the shattering advent of the First World War. On leaving school Louie determines to train for business, to "start life as a stern realist," but finds instead that she will need emotional courage if she is to be the woman her soul demands."
29lippincote
30Sakerfalcon
31LyzzyBee
32kaggsy
33kayclifton
34BeyondEdenRock
>31 LyzzyBee: >32 kaggsy: Yes, but he was paired successfully with two other Virago authors - those paintings are coming very soon.
35BeyondEdenRock
'Interior at Cookham with Spring Flowers' by Stanley Spencer
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'Palladian' by Elizabeth Taylor (#184)
"Young Cassandra is alone in the world, her father had just died. When she goes to Cropthorne Manor as a governess, its weary facade and crumbling statues are all that she could hope for. And Marion Vanbrugh is the perfect employer - a widower, austere and distant, with a penchant for Greek. But this is not a ninteenth-century novel and Cassandra's Mr. Rochester isn't the only inhabitant of the Manor. There's Tom, irascible and discontented, Margaret, pregnant and voracious, the ineffectual Tinty and the eccentric, domineering Nanny. Just as Jane Austen wittily contrasted real life with a girl's Gothic fantasies in Northhanger Abbey, so Elizabeth Taylor subtly examines the realities of life for a latter-day Jane Eyre in this sharply observed work, first published in 1946."
36BeyondEdenRock
'The Angel, Cookham Churchyard' by Stanley Spencer
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'The World, My Wilderness' by Rose Macaulay (#104)
"It is 1946, and the people of France and England are facing the aftermath of the Second World War. Barbara Deniston, seventeen, has grown up in the sunshine of Provence with her voluptuous, indolent but intelligent mother, allowed to run wild with the Maquis, experiencing collaboration, betrayal - and death. Banished by her mother to England, Barbara is thrown into the ordered formality of English life with her distinguished father and conventional stepmother. Confused and unhappy, she discovers one day the wrecked and flowering wastes around St. Paul's. Here, in the bombed heart of London, she finds an echo of the wilderness of Provence and is forced to confront the wilderness within herself."
39bleuroses
40BeyondEdenRock
'The Fair Isle Jumper' by Stanley Cursiter
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'The Camomile' by Catherine Carswell (#261)
'Ellen Carstairs has spent two glorious years as a student in Frankfurt. Returning to Glasgow to teach music, she begins a journal for her college friend Ruby. Here she pours out her observations, her ambition to write and her frustrations. For the oppressive and religious attitudes of her peers are a great contrast to Ellen's own enlightened views about sex and independence. First published in 1922, this semi-autobiographical novel is a lively and sympathetic portrait of a young women's ideals. Ellen's engagement to Duncan, a young doctor, threatens to distance her from the freedom she seeks, but her friendship with a poor, ascetic scholar helps Ellen to realize that she must not be moulded by convention.'
41BeyondEdenRock
'South of France' by Duncan Grant
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'Death Comes for the Archbishop' by Willa Cather (#58)
'One summer evening in the year of 1848 three Cardinals and a missionary, dining in a villa near Rome, decide the fate of a simple parish priest, the Frenchman Jean Marie Latour. He is to go to New Mexico to win for Catholicism the South-West of America, a country where the Faith has slumbered for centuries. There, together with his old friend Father Vaillant, Latour makes his home. To the carnelian hills and ochre-yellow deserts of this almost pagan land he brings the refined traditions of French culture and Christian belief. Slowly, gently he reforms and revivifies, after forty years of love and service achieving a final reconciliation between his faith and the sensual peasant people of New Mexico: a harmony embodied in the realisation of his most cherished dream - a Romanesque cathedral, carved from the Mexican rock, gold as sunlight.'
42lippincote
43Sakerfalcon
44kaggsy
46BeyondEdenRock
>44 kaggsy: >45 bleuroses: I have yet to read the book, and clearly I must.
47BeyondEdenRock
Illustration by Helen Dryden
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'Treasure Hunt' by Molly Keane (#356)
'When old Sir Roderick dies in the stately but crumbling Irish mansion, his family discover that he's left nothing but debts. His brother Hercules and sister Consuelo cannot understand why they cannot continue their feckless, champagne-drinking ways. They are outraged when young Roderick and Veronica insist on stringent economies and taking in paying guests. Meanwhile dotty Aunt Anna Rose, ensconced in her sedan chair (which she fondly believes to be the Orient Express) has a Dark Secret and, just possibly some long-lost rubies...Originally a play, this 1952 novel sparkles with comedy, mystery and a gallery of eccentricities.'
48BeyondEdenRock
The Language of Flowers by George Dunlop Leslie
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'The Semi-Attached Couple' and 'The Semi-Detached House' by Emily Eden (#16)
'Born the daughter of Lord Auckland in 1797, Emily Eden was a witty nineteenth-century aristocrat whose two delightful novels were first presented to an admiring world one hundred and fifty years ago. These matching masterpieces satirize the social world Eden knew, loved, and laughed at. Like Jane Austen she is concerned with love and marriage, money and manners. but her voice is distinct. Eden's charm and humour - both above- and below-stairs -- and her sharp social commentary make her work enduringly captivating.'
49Sakerfalcon
50kaggsy
51bleuroses
52BeyondEdenRock
>51 bleuroses: Thank you, that is so lovely to know. This is having the same effect on me. I am reading The Camomile and I have one of today's books lined up to read very soon.
53BeyondEdenRock
'Julia Strachey' by Carrington
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'The Judge' by Rebecca West (#33)
'Ellen Melville is a beautiful, red-haired suffragette who, at seventeen, wants passionately to experience all that life can give her. From her abandoned and impoverished mother she inherits only a capacity for love, and this she gives freely when she meets Richard Yaverland--charming, experienced, a man of the world. But Richard is the illegitimate son of a powerful and frustrated woman. Marion Yaverland uses her own betrayal by Richard's father to imprison her son, creating a murderous bond that destroys everything it touches. The struggle of Ellen and Richard to survive the sins of their fathers takes its inevitable course: giving freely to her passionate lover, Ellen commences a re-enactment of all that has gone before. . .'
54BeyondEdenRock
'The Letter' by Mary Cassatt
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'Fraulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther' by Elizabeth Von Arnim (#101)
'This enchanting novel tells the story of the love affair between Rose-Marie Schmidt and Roger Anstruther. A determined young woman of twenty-five, Rose-Marie is considered a spinster by the inhabitants of the small German town of Jena where she lives with her father, the Professor. To their home comes Roger, an impoverished but well-born young Englishman who wishes to learn German. Rose-Marie and Roger fall in love. But the course of true love does not run smooth, distance, temperament and fortune divide them. We watch the ebb and flow of love between two very different people and see the witty and wonderful Rose-Marie get exactly what she wants.'
55kayclifton
56BeyondEdenRock
(The images in this thread all come from Pinterest)
57BeyondEdenRock
'Titbits' by Harold Harvey
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'The New House' by Lettice Cooper (#263)
"Rhoda Powell wakes knowing that her mother's selfish and repining ways will impede their removal from Stone Hall to a new, smaller home. She feels as tethered to her mother's whims as when she was a child. Maurice, a parent himself now, seems similarly trapped by his boyhood role. only Delia, their younger sister, has moved South, leaving Swarfdale and its memories behind. And Aunt Ellen, the spinster of the previous generation, is a warning to Rhoda of the woman she will become if she does not break away..."
58BeyondEdenRock
L'Ambitiuse by James Tissot
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Old New York by Edith Wharton (#179)
'The four novellas collected here, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'The Age of Innocence', brilliantly capture New York of the 1840s, '50s, '60s, and '70s. Originally published in 1924, this outstanding quartet includes 'False Dawn', about a rocky father/son relationship; 'The Old Maid', the best known of the four, in which a young woman's hidden illegitimate child is adoted by her best friend, with devastating results; 'The Spark', involving a young man and his moral rehabilitation -- "sparked" by a chance encounter with Walt Whitman; and 'New Year's Day', an O. Henryesque tale of a married woman suspected of adultery. Each reveals the codes and customs that ruled society of the time, drawn with the perspicacious eye and style that is uniquely Edith Wharton's.'
59lippincote
60bleuroses
>57 BeyondEdenRock: Harvey is wonderful. You're so lucky to live in Cornwall, Jane.
>59 lippincote: It's a pretty awful dress isn't it! Apparently she thinks she looks smashing!
61BeyondEdenRock
>60 bleuroses: I hadn't looked closely at that portrait before but now I love it.
Harold Harvey is probably my favourite of the Newlyn school artists, closely followed by Dod Procter.
Here are two favourite paintings - the first would have been lovely for A View of the Harbour and the second one would have suited a number of books but couldn't have been made-book cover-shaped..
French Crabbers (in Newlyn Harbour) by Harold Harvey
'Morning' by Dod Procter
62kaggsy
63BeyondEdenRock
'Along the Shore' by J E Southall
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'The Brontes Went to Woolworths' by Rachel Ferguson (#279)
"Pre-war London, and the idea of growing up looms large in the lives of the Carne sisters. Deirdre, Katrine and young Sheil still cannot resist making up stories as they have done since childhood; from their talking nursery toys to their fulsomely imagined friendship with real high-court Judge Toddington. But when Deirdre meets the judge's real-life wife at a charity bazaar the sisters are forced to confront the subject of their imaginings. Will they cast off the fantasies of childhood forever?"
64BeyondEdenRock
'The Arrival of the Jarrow Marchers in London' by Thomas Cantrell Dugdale
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'Together and Apart' by Margaret Kennedy (#64)
"Betsy is married to Alec. They have three half-grown children, a Hampstead home, a holiday house in Wales and all the comforts of British middle-class life between the wars. It is 1936 and Betsy is thirty-seven. Alec, she discovers, has been having a desultory affair - one of no importance to him, and at first even Betsy is not too concerned about it. But where, Betsy feels, is the happiness which is her due? And she is tired; houses, servants, children make eternal demands upon her, family and friends constantly interfere - in this instance just once too often, with startling results..."
65LyzzyBee
66kaggsy
67Sakerfalcon
68BeyondEdenRock
69BeyondEdenRock
'Woman with a Polish Shawl' by Moise Kisling
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'Deborah' by Esther Kreitman (#108)
"All the world has heard of the great Yiddish writer Isacc Bashevis Singer, and of his brother Israel Joshua. Few have heard of their sister Hinde Esther who lived in obscurity and also wrote novels. Published first in Yiddish in 1936 and translated by her son in 1946, Deborah is an autobiographical novel. It takes us back with cinematic immediacy to the world of Polish Jewry in the middle of Europe well before the First World War. Deborah is the daughter of a feckless, unworldy rabbi, Reb Avram Ber, and his wife, Raizela. She is fourteen years old, sensitive, intelligent and romantic; but the two things she longs for are denied her: education and marriage to the man of her choice - a dark-eyed Marzist she meets in Warsaw's Jewish Ghetto. For Deborah is doubly oppressed: there is literally no hope for women in this society if the established order is not accepted. Propelled into an arranged marriage, she escapes her family and her country on the eve of the First World War to dream a terrifying dream of another - a portent of the horror that lay in store for millions of Jews in the decades to follow."
70BeyondEdenRock
'The Dutch Doll' by Mark Gertler
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'The Gipsy's Baby and Other Stories' by Rosamond Lehmann (#69)
"In these captivating short stories we find perfect miniatures of Rosamond Lehmann's fictional world. Echoing the themes which permeate her finest fiction, here are delicate portrayals of the world of adults as seen through the eyes of curious children, fascination with different families - their otherness, the romance of separate worlds. Most moving are the stories set against the background of Britain at war: the world of women and children, the minutiae of daily life in rural England - all are recorded with unmatched sensitivity and precision."
71bleuroses
>64 BeyondEdenRock: I love the glamour of this painting and again, another perfect match with the book.
>69 BeyondEdenRock: A beautiful poignant portrait and a heartbreaking story. 'Deborah' was originally published under the title 'Dance of the Demons'. 💔
>70 BeyondEdenRock: Interesting painting by Gertler. I've known of him but never looked into his work. Haven't read the book yet.
72BeyondEdenRock
'Betty and Babbin by a Fountain' by Mainie Jellett
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Jenny Wren by E H Young (#177)
'On their father's death, Jenny and Dahlia Rendall, with their mother Louisa, move across the river to the heights of Upper Radstowe. Here they try to make a living by taking in lodgers. But their neighbours eye this all-female household with alarm and distrust -- especially when a local farmer takes to calling on Louisa, now an attractive, if not entirely respectable widow. Dahlia takes it all with a pinch of salt; fastidious, conventional Jenny cannot. Embarrassed by her mother's country ways, smarting at every slight, both real and imaginary, she longs for a different life. Then Jenny falls in love with a handsome young squire -- but certain of his prejudice and a prisoner of her pride, she dares not reveal her name ...'
73BeyondEdenRock
'A Pleasant Corner' by John Callcott Horsley
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'The Perpetual Curate' by Margaret Oliphant (#243)
"Frank Wentworth, Perpetual Curate of St Roque's, has basked in the popularity of Carlingford, beloved in the gracious homes of Grange Lane and the slums of Wharfside alike. But there are some among the sober-minded citizens who would see him as a "dilettante Anglican, given over to floral ornaments and ecclesiastical upholstery" - a verdict shared by the new Rector who regards the presence of a young and energetic rival as an intolerable encumbrance. Imperceptibly, the tide starts turning against Frank Wentworth: his love for Lucy Wodehouse is threatened by his lack of prospects; his Evangelical aunts, in charge of a family living, disapprove of his high church ways, and rumours about a pretty shop-girl begin circulating. Slowly it dawns on Frank that he may well be doomed to a life of perpetual - and single - curacy. "
74LyzzyBee
75Liz1564
76kayclifton
77BeyondEdenRock
>75 Liz1564: I'd keep this one for the cover and the contents. I've been thinning out my books and I'm finding that the authors I'm less attached too have less appealing artworks than most.
>76 kayclifton: That is great - there are many more lovely paintings still to come.
78BeyondEdenRock
'Vierges Modernes' by Jean Raoux
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'Millenium Hall' by Sarah Scott (#214)
'Millenium Hall is an elegant mansion, surrounded by fragrant pastures and hedgerows of hyacinths and primroses. In this idyllic setting live six women of independent means who have eschewed the falsehoods of society and come together to establish a utopian community. Their backgrounds are very different but a common spirit unites them: all have rejected the image of woman as chattel, choosing instead to devote themsleves to a co-operative life founded on female friendship and support. Published anonymously in 1762, this forgotten, visionary work was one of the first novels to show that marriage need not be the ultimate ambition for a woman.'
79BeyondEdenRock
'The Penitent Magdalen' by Georges de la Tour
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'Women in the Wall' by Julia O'Faolain (#170)
'In the novel--as in history--Radegunda is the wife of Clotair, King of Gaul, seized by him as a prize of war. When she suspects Clotair of murdering her brother, she retreats from the blood-lust of the Dark Ages. Taking the young, innocent Agnes with her, she establishes a religious order where pain and denial are deemed the pathways to virtue and redemption. But the "calm" of self-renunciation cannot last when a sexual scandal involving Agnes is exposed. To expiate this sin, the "victim" fanatically decides to wall herself up. This decision sets off vicious rivalries among the women and draws Radegunda back to the kind of world she had escaped from.'
80kaggsy
81kaggsy
82LyzzyBee
83BeyondEdenRock
'L'infante égarée' by Marion Elizabeth Adnams
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'Cassandra at the Wedding' by Dorothy Baker (#67)
'It is the hottest June 21st since 1912, and the longest day of the year. Casandra Edwards-tormented, intelligent, mordantly witty - leaves her doctoral thesis and her Berkeley flat to drive through the scorching heat to her family's ranch. There they are all assembled: her philosopher father smelling so sweetly of five-star Hennessey, her kind, fussy grandmother, her beloved, her identical, her inseparable (soon to be separated) twin sister Judith. For the occasion is Judith's marriage to a young Connecticut doctor; though it won't be if Cassandra can help it ...'
84BeyondEdenRock
'Orchids, Passion Flowers and Hummingbird' by Martin Johnson Heade
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'The Orchid House' by Phyllis Shand Allfrey (#73)
'Under the watchful gaze of their Black nurse Lally, three white Creole girls grow up at Maison Rose on the Island of Dominica, with its glades of glittering live trees , flaring hibiscus and milky-scented frangipani. But this drowsy heat-drenched lushness conceals decay, and the orchid house echoes with the strange whispered secrets of their enclosed world. To survive, the girls must abandon their island of disease and beauty for the cold northern lands of England and America. Lally watches as they leave, one by one, and waits for their return. As return they must - to their magic past, to the orchid house, and to the man whom all three sisters love...'
85kaggsy
86kaggsy
87Sakerfalcon
>83 BeyondEdenRock: I have the later Virago edition of Cassandra at the wedding which has a painting by Paul Delvaux on the cover. It's an effective choice but I like that the original cover painting is by a woman.
88lippincote
89BeyondEdenRock
>86 kaggsy: It was pure luck that I found a copy with that cover. I suspect it may not have been around for very long before being superceded by the photographic cover.
>87 Sakerfalcon: I hadn't known that there was a later green cover until you mentioned it. Now that i've seen it I like it, but not as much as my cover.
>88 lippincote: Cassandra's cover is one of the best. I have seen lots of tv tie-in copies of 'The Orchid House' over the years but only one copy with an original cover.
90BeyondEdenRock
'Waiting' by Gordon Coutts
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'My Career Goes Bung' by Miles Franklin (#52)
'In this, Miles Franklin's sequel to her famous novel My Brilliant Career, once again we encounter the enchanting Sybylla Melvyn. She's a little older now, catapulted from bush obscurity into sudden fame with the publication of her autobiography. Meekly attired in white muslin and cashmere stockings, she goes to fashionable Sydney to become a literary lioness, but her patrons, her critics and her innumerable suitors meet more than they bargained for in the irrepressible Sybylla. When Sybylla complains of her lot as a woman, Ma has always said "You'll have to get used to it, there is no sense in acting like one possessed of a devil." But Sybylla is, she clamours for LIFE, and refuses to tolerate anything which stands in her way. She recounts her experiences, most particularly her love affairs, with the same spirit, sensitivity and forthright attack which characterised her first volume of memoirs and emerges once again undaunted: the most exceptional fictional heroine of her time, and ours.'
91BeyondEdenRock
'Glitter' by William McGregor Paxton
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'Cousin Rosamund' by Rebecca West (#303)
' 'Cousin Rosamund 'unfolds the final chapters of the saga that began with 'The Fountain Overflows', Rebecca West's acknowleged masterpiece, and continued with T'his Real Night'. As the glitter of the 1920s gives way to the Depression, Rose and Mary find themselves feted and successful pianists. But their happiness is diminished by their cousin's unfathomable marriage to a man they perceive as grotesque.Lacking her cousin Rosamund's intuitive understanding, Rose looks to the surrogate wisdom of Mr Morpurgo, while quiet days with Aunt Lily and the Darcys at their pub on the Thames offer respite from the tensions of foreign concert tours. With approaching middle age Rose gains in perspective. Yet the most exciting development still awaits her: the discovery of and delight in her own sexuality.'
92Sakerfalcon
93BeyondEdenRock
94BeyondEdenRock
'Joueuses de Cartes' by Tamara de Lempicka
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'Smoke & Other Stories' by Djuna Barnes (#167)
'First published in New York newspapers between 1914 and 1916 these fourteen incisive tales wonderfully evoke Greenwich Village Bohemia of that time. Sketched with an exquisite and decadent pen are lovers and loners, schemers and dreamers, terrorists and cowards, and many, many more. There's the terrible 'Peacock', a 'slinky female with electrifying eyes and red hair' whom all men pursue but cannot entice; Paprika Johnson softly playing her pawnshop banjo above Swingerhoger's Beer Garden and Mamie Saloam the dancer who 'became fire and felt hell'. There's Clochetter Brin who 'knew that love and lottery went together', the silent Lena whose stolid appearance disguised her animal spirit and the cunning Madeleonette whose lovers enact the most dramatic rite of all.'
95BeyondEdenRock
'Still Life' by Henry Church Jr.
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'Losing Battles' by Eudora Welty (#208)
'On the hot dry first Sunday of August, three generations of Granny Vaughn's descendants gather at her home in Banner, Mississippi, for a family reunion in celebration of her ninetieth birthday. The action covers two days, but in memory many decades, for the members of this enormous family are wonderful raconteurs. Through a myriad of raised voices we enter their world - -both present and past - and as this magnificently orchestrated novel rises to its crescendo, Eudora Welty subtly reveals that battles seemingly lost can also be secretly won.'
96kaggsy
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'Regina Cordium' by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
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'Red Pottage' by Mary Cholmondeley (#187)
'Rachel West and Hester Gresley have been friends since nursery days. Rachel, calm and practical, inherits a fortune after years of poverty in the East End of London but falls in love with a philanderer. Hester, imaginative and excitable, has published a successful novel, but her aunt's death forces her to live in the stifling atmosphere of her clergyman brother's house. This absorbing novel, first published in 1899, explores the ways in which two very different women search for fulfilment in a society bound by convention.'
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'Interior' by Duncan Grant
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'Rhapsody' by Dorothy Edwards (#204)
'Set in the leisurely world of country houses, rambling walks, afternoon teas and piano duets, these deceptively simple tales are of women and men who come together, sometimes ludicrously, often sadly - if at all. They tell of unrequited love and jealousy, of the separateness of one human being from another, all enacted beneath the smooth veneer of English life at its most civilized. The theme of music weaves in and out of this volume of enchanting stories, first published in 1927. Reminiscent of Katherine Mansfield in mood and texture, they are nevertheless the work of an absolutely individual talent.'
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'Portrait of a Midinette' by Herbert James Gunn
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'Good Daughters' by Mary Hocking (#340)
'Mary Hocking brings good humour and sympathy to her depiction of the Fairley sisters growing up in their close-knit West London neighbourhood before, during and after the war. Here, in the first novel of a trilogy, the girls are sheltered in a world whose traditions of hard work and frugality are upheld in their Methodist father, Stanley, and their strong quiet mother, Judith. But as love comes to Louise and adventures tempt Alice and her friend, unease lurks and terrible rumours travel from Germany - auguries of the catastrophe to come.'
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'Marjorie And Lettice Wormald' by Arthur Hughes
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'The Daisy Chain' by Charlotte Mary Yonge (#282)
'The May family live in the fine old town of Market Stoneborough where Doctor May is a respected figure at the centre of the community. His wife's untimely death in a carriage accident leaves eleven children in his care, the youngest, Daisy, a mere baby. But their mother's teaching has bequeathed to each child a sense of love and moral duty which will guide the separate paths - of scholarship, philanthropy, seafaring, marriage and politics - which shape this stirring family' chronicle.
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All of these have been just beautiful--thanks for sharing and highlighting Virago books that are new to me.
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'A Game of Patience' by Meredith Frampton
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'Year Before Last' by Kay Boyle (#225)
'Hannah leaves her husband to be with the brilliant writer and editor, Martin, in a chateau on the French Riviera. He had planned to buy lobster in celebration of her arrival, but there are unpaid bills and they must live hand to mouth. Drifting through these sensuous early days, they are pursued by Hannah's memories and the more vigilant shadow of Eve, Martin's rich and possessive aunt. And as their relationship develops life becomes a tangle of hotel rooms and prying eyes, caught between the luxuriance of love and Eve's malicious jealousy. This richly-textured novel, first published in 1932, reveals Kay Boyle's strength as an innovative Modernist writer. Exploring love - and the death of love - it is delicate, precise and lyrical.'
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Portrait Of Mrs. George Henry Boughton by George Henry Boughton
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'All Passion Spent' by Vita Sackville-West (#110)
'In 1860, as a young girl of seventeen, Lady Slane nurtures a secret, burning ambition: to become an artist. She becomes, instead, the wife of a great statesman, Henry, first Earl of Slane, and the mother of six children. Seventy years later, released by widowhood, she abandons the family home in Elm Park Gardens much to the dismay of her pompous sons and daughters. Retiring to a tiny house in Hampstead she recollects the dreams of youth and enjoys the mellow present in the company of those she has chosen. There is her French maid Genoux, her house agent Mr Buchtrout, her painter and carpenter Mr. Gosheron, and lastly Mr FitzGeorge, an eccentric millionaire who had met and loved her in India when she was young and very lovely. Lady Slane finds at last - in this world of her own - a passion, one that comes with the freedom to choose; this, her greatest gift, she passes on to the only one who can understand its value.'
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'Spitfires attacking Flying Bombs 1944' by Thomas Monnington
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'On the Side of the Angels' by Betty Miller (#197)
'Honor Carmichael and her two young children are uprooted to Lanfield, where her husband Colin, a dapper, small-town doctor, is stationed at the RAMC hospital. She is visited by her sister Claudia, whose friend, Andrew, waits to be invalided out of the Army. Whilst Andrew dismisses himsely as "damaged goods", Colin beomes absorbed by the petty feuds and power games of uniformed life - most particulary with the arrival of Captain Herriot, a commando and the C.O.'s current favourite. Apparantly peripheral to this "male pirouetting", Honor and Claudia are nevertheless deeply affected by this war. For its threat to notions of masculinity forces both women to reassess the roles they've always played.'
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'Medallion' by Gluck
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'The Well of Loneliness' by Radclyffe Hall (#76)
'Living in the baronial splendour of Morton Hall, at the foot of the Malvern Hills, Sir Philip and Lady Gordon long to complete their happiness with a son and heir. But their only child is born a girl -- and they baptise her Stephen. As she grows up -- tall, broad-shouldered, handsome -- it becomes apparent that Stephen is not like other girls. She learns to ride, fence and hunt, she wears breeches and longs to crop her hair. Instinctively the people of Great Malvern draw away from her, aware of something -- some indefinable thing -- that sets her apart. From a difficult, lonely childhood, through a tormented adolescence, Stephen Gordon reaches maturity and falls passionately in love -- with another woman.'
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Somebody clearly took a lot of trouble, and it is worth noting as well as the available artworks that can be shared here there are some that aren't available, because they were borrowed from private collections and from contemporary artists.
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'Room in Brooklyn' by Edward Hopper
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'None Turn Back' by Storm Jameson (#132)
'It is 6th May, the third day of the General Strike ... This is the story of that harrowing week seen through the eyes of the women and men of London as they move through that unreal city. We meet those who gave their all for the strike -and a vision of a better world. We meet, too, those who fought to break it with every weapon they had: power, politics, money - or brute force. There are masters and workmen, fascists and communists, politicians and trade unionists, wives and mistresses, artists, writers and scientists, all caught up in the web of each other's lives. But above all we follow the thread of Hervey Russell's life as she is swept up by the political ferment around her, by the difficulties of a new marriage, and by her hopes and fears for the future... '
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'Souvenirs' by Thea Proctor
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'Painted Clay' by Capel Boake (#231)
"Helen Somerset feels stifled by her loveless home with a repressive father who fears that, like her absent mother, she may be only "painted clay." She wants to know life beyond the confines of Packington, a Melbourne suburb overlooking Port Phillip Bay. And when she is sixteen her father dies, releasing Helen to seek the affection and independence she has been denied. With a clerical job and a room in a lodging house Helen launches herself into the excitement of Bohemian life and free love--only to discover that this liberation has a double edge."
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Those Edward Hopper covers on the Storm Jameson novels were part of the reading experience for me. I don't think I'd have enjoyed them as much in a different edition.
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When I just saw the names Edward Hopper and Storm Jameson seemed like a strange match, but when I looked at the covers they really worked.
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Donna Sol Balcone by Ubaldo Oppi
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'The Diviners' by Margaret Laurence (#323)
'Morag Dunn, now in her mid-forties, lives in a riverside farmhouse in Eastern Ontario. Through a series of flashbacks she looks at the painful and exhilarating moments of her earlier life: her childhood on the social margins of the small prairie town of Manawaka; her relationship with Jules Tonnerre which grows out of their shared alienation; her demeaning marriage and her escape from it into writing fiction, and her travels to England and Scotland and, finally, back to rural Canada, where she faces a different challenge - the necessity to understand, and let go of, the daughter she loves.'
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'Hector and Andromache' by Giorgio di Chirico
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'Life Before Man' by Margaret Atwood (#68)
'Life Before Man chronicles with ironic precision, in masterful prose, the tragicomedy we call love between the sexes. Elizabeth - monstrous yet pitiable, Nate her husband - a patchwork man, gentle, disillusioned, and Leslie his lover, a young woman prehistoric in her simplicity, form a sexual triangle whose encounter illuminate profound truths about contemporary experience.'
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'Studio Lunch' by Henry Siddons Mowbray
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'The Fruit of the Tree' by Edith Wharton (#145)
'John Amherst, clever, idealistic and poor, is assistant manager of a cotton mill and has the makings of a working-class leader. While visiting a worker in hospital he encounters a young nurse, Justine, compassionate and principled, a woman who shares his aims and dreams. But Amherst is fatally distracted when he meets Bessy. A widow of great wealth, Bessy is charming, beautiful - and the new owner of the mill. The lives of all three become strangely interwoven as Amherst is forced to choose between sense and sentiment, between his care for the working classes and his infatuation with Bessy - a woman made for passion, but not for its aftermath.'
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'A Portrait Group' by James Cowie
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'Another Time Another Place' by Jessie Kesson (#379)
'In 1944 Italian prisoners of war are billeted in a tiny village in the far northeast of Scotland. Janie, who works the land and is married to a farm labourer fifteen years older than herself, is to look after three of them. While her neighbours regard the Italians with a mixture of resentment and indifference, Janie is intrigued by this glimpse of another, more romantic world - with almost inevitable consequences. Much more than a simple love story, Another Time, Another Place is also a vibrant portrait of a rural community enveloped by an untamed landscape.'
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'Lupins & Cactus' by Paul Nash
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'The Grain of Truth' by Nina Bawden (#387)
'Emma's anxious and manipulative plea, 'Someone listen to me', opens - and closes - this deliciously uncomfortable novel in which Nina Bawden explores myriad emotional disguises with her characteristeric acuity. When Emma's father-in-law falls down the stairs to his death, she is convinced she pushed him in an act of wish-fulfulment. To her husband Henry and her close friend Holly, this is unthinkable. Guilt is simply Emma's obsession in a humdrum domestic existence enlivened by romantic fantasy. For Holly, who successfully fields a string of love affairs, sexual pleasures are more easily attainable, whereas Henry, a divorce lawyer, prides himself on being a realist. Each tells their story in turn, illuminating and distorting their separate versions of the truth. As they do so, an intricate jigsaw of the private deceits with which they shore up daily life emerges.'
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'The Birdcage' by Henry Tonks
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'The Squire' by Enid Bagnold (#246)
'At the Manor House on the village green, the household waits in restless suspense. The master is in Bombay, the mistress, its temporary squire, is heavy with child and languorous. Her four young children distract her with their demands, her friend Caroline tells the squire of her latest lover, her restless adventuring a sharp contrast to the squire's own mood. And watching and waiting for the birth, the squire contemplates the woman she was, "strutting about life for spoil" and the woman she is now, another being, "occupied with her knot of human lives" '.
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'Seated Woman' by Pablo Picasso
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'Two Worlds and Their Ways' by Ivy Compton-Burnett (#354)
'Sefton and his sister Clemence are dispatched to separate boarding schools. Their father's second marriage, their mother's economies, provide perfect opportunities for mockery, and home becomes a source of shame. More wretched is their mother's insistence that they excel. Their desperate means to please her incite adult approbrium, but how did the children learn to deceive? Here staccato dialogue, brittle aphorisms and an excoriating wit are used to unparalleled and subversive effect ruthlessly to expose the wounds beneath the surface of family life.'
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'Portrait of a Young Woman' by Mainie Jellett
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'The Rising Tide' by Molly Keane (#137)
'In 1900 Lady Charlotte French-McGrath continues to rule her family and household with a rod of iron. She is mistress of Garonlea--a huge gothic house in Ireland--, wife to Ambrose French-McGrath and mother of Muriel, Enid, Violet, Diana and Desmond. Their life flows on until two events, years apart, which irrevocably break Lady Charlotte's matriarchal hold. The first is Desmond's marriage to the beautiful, lively Cynthia. The second is the First World War bringing the grief of bereavement and finally shattering the rigid codes of the Edwardian era. Cynthia enters the jazz age and on the surface her life passes in a whirl of fox-hunting, drinking and love-making. But the ghosts of Garonlea are only biding their time: they know the source of their power, a secret handed on from one generation to the next...'
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I went through a period of trying to read a few of the books by Ivy Compton-Burnett and it was daunting. She was well thought of by the critics which impressed me but I finally had to give up.
The following blurb is from the "Guardian">
"Two of our greatest living literary Hilarys (Mantel and Spurling, who wrote a hard-to-find two-volume life of Ivy) are her champions. Mantel wrote: 'Ivy Compton-Burnett is one of the most original, artful and elegant writers of our century. To read her for the first time is a singular experience. There is almost no description or scene setting; the writing is pared to the bone, the technique is a gavotte on needles. The story unfolds in page after page of spiked dialogue. It is not always clear who is speaking; the words themselves are unlike any you have come across before.' Mantel wrote these words in the last century (Compton-Burnett died in 1969), but Ivy's originality, artfulness and elegance have hardly been eclipsed in the new millennium"
(Maybe the author's quotes are a key to the significance of the illustration)
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'Premium' by Carl 'Eric' Erickson
(The cover of Vogue USA 1st June 1933)
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'Illyrian Spring' by Ann Bridge (#348)
'Even though she is a renowned painter Lady Kilmichael is diffident and sad. Her remote, brilliant husband has no time for her and she feels she only exasperates her delightful, headstrong daughter. So, telling no one where she is going, she embarks on a painting trip to the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia - in the Thirties a remote and exotic place. There she takes under her wing Nicholas, a bitterly unhappy young man, forbidden by his family to pursue the painting he loves and which Grace recognises as being of rare quality. Their adventures and searching discussions lead to something much deeper than simple friendship...
This beautiful novel, gloriously evoking the countryside and people of Illyria, has been a favourite since its publication in 1935, both as sensitive travel book and as unusual and touching love story.'
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'Portrait of Nina Hamnett' by Roger Fry
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'Over the Frontier' by Stevie Smith (#19)
' 'Over the Frontier' was first published in 1938 and was Stevie Smith's second novel, closely following 'Novel on Yellow Paper', beginning where that famous novel ends. While sharing the poetic quality, the quirky humour and caustic wit common to all her work, 'Over the Frontier' is quite unlike anything else Stevie Smith wrote. It is a fantastic tale of adventure and intrigue -- one in which Stevie dons the unlikely mantle of John Buchan -- and a profound exploration of larger themes: ambition, militarism, nationalism, love, loyalty, death. It is 1936. Stevie's heroine and alter ego Pompey Casmilus lives in London with her beloved Aunt, bothered by the menace of German militarism, bothered too by the humbug which confronts it, bothered most of all by her hopeless love affair with Freddy. Its ending plunges Pompey into melancholy, six months rest and recuperation are prescribed and, 'savage, sick and cross', Pompey goes to Schloss Tilssen on the northern German border, only to fall in with a strange band of conspirators: the plum coloured Mrs Pouncer, the absent minded Colonel Peck, and the dashing Major Tom Satterthwaite, whom Pompey comes to love. How Pompey gets into uniform and becomes a spy is only one of the astounding events in this extraordinary novel which, on a serious level, is also a powerful investigation of power and cruelty in a world preparing for war.
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I have see the Daunt editions and they are lovely.
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'At The Dressing Table' by Harold Harvey
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'Chatterton Square by E. H. Young (#242)
'Fastidious Mr. Blackett rules his home in Upper Radstowe with a gloomy and niggardly spirit, and his wife Bertha and their three daughters succumb to his dictates unquestioningly -- until the arrival next door of the Fraser family 'with no apparent male chieftain at the head of it'. The delightful, unconventional Rosamund presides over this unruly household with shocking tolerance and good humour, and Herbert Blackett is both fascinated and repelled by his sensuous and 'unprincipled' neighbour. But whilst he struts in the background, allegiances form between Rosamund and Bertha and their children, bringing changes to Chatterton Square which, in the months leading up to the Second World War, are intensified by the certainty that nothing can be taken for granted.'
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'Wild Flowers With The Mussenden Temple In View' by Andrew Nicholl
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'In a Summer Season' by Elizabeth Taylor (#112)
'Kate Heron is a wealthy charming widow who marries a man ten years her junior: the attractive, feckless Dermot. They live in commuter country, an hour from London. Theirs is an unconventional marriage, but a happy one. Their special love arms them against the disapproval of conservative friends and neighbours - until the return of Kate's old friend Charles, intelligent, kind, now widowed with a beautiful daughter. Happily, she watches as their two families are drawn together, finding his presence reassuringly familiar. But then one night she dreams a strange and sensual dream: a dream that disturbs the calm surface of their friendship - foreshadowing dramas fate holds in store for them all.'
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'Innocentia' by Franz van Stuck
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'I Will Not Serve' by Evelyn Mahyère (#142)
'Sylvie is a rebellious and impetuous schoolgirl of seventeen. Three months before she is due to take her Baccalaureate the convent of Sainte-Thérèse expels her - because she has fallen passionately in love with her teacher, the nun Julienne. So Sylvie retreats to the demi-monde of Paris in the 1950s: a world of bars, jazz and bohemianism. But she refuses to forget Julienne, bombarding her with letters, forcing her to confront a love which has for Sylvie the revelatory force of a religious experience. Sometimes she is in ecstasy, often in the depths of despair, always she is fervent, obsessed - until, driven by Julienne's ambivalence and the unyielding bourgeois world, she commits the rashest act of all...'
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'Dorelia McNeill in the Garden at Alderney Manor' by Augustus John
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'Barren Ground' by Ellen Glasgow (#219)
'Set in 1925, this is the story of Dorinda Oakley. As a young woman she works in a general store whilst her parents eke out their existence on the starved Virginian land. To Dorinda, Jason Greylock seems to offer an escape from this monotony and she falls in love with him. But Jason seduces and then abandons her. For years Dorinda strives to quieten the bitterness of rejection. Turning back to the land, she works the soil with the intensity of feeling she offered Jason and, as a middle-aged woman, emerges, triumphant, self-possessed. Described by Ellen Glasgow as a work by which she would like to be judged as a novelist, this is a strong and deterministic work. "For once in Southern fiction" she wrote, "the betrayed woman would become the victor instead of the victim.'
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'Arum Lilies' by Vanessa Bell
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'Lolly Willowes' by Sylvia Townsend Warner (#390)
'Lolly Willowes is a twenty-eight-year-old spinster when her adored father dies, leaving her dependent upon her brothers and their wives. After twenty years of self-effacement as a maiden aunt, she decides to break free and moves to a small Bedfordshire village. Here, happy and unfettered, she enjoys her new existence nagged only by the sense of a secret she has yet to discover. That secret--and her vocation--is witchcraft, and with her cat and a pact with the Devil, Lolly Willowes is finally free. An instant and great success on its publication in 1926, Lolly Willowes is Sylvia Townsend Warner's most magical novel. Deliciously wry and inviting, it was her piquant plea that single women find liberty and civility--and her pursuit of the theme Virginia Woolf later explored in A Room of One's Own... '
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'Flora Fairy Child' by Peter Blake
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'The Doves of Venus' by Olivia Manning (#149)
'Red-haired, eighteen-year-old Ellie leaves her home in the provincial seaside town of Eastsea and goes to London in search of independence, employment and experience. She finds a bedsit in Chelsea, a job painting "antique" furniture and a middle-aged lover called Quintin Bellot. Quintin's life is spent under the beady eye of his neurotic es-wife Petta who haunts King's Road pubs with assorted Bohemians, nurturing virulent feelings towards Quintin's "little girls". And Ellie, having given her heart with the impetuosity of youth, gradually discovers the eternal complications of a love affair with a married man...'
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I really don't understand how words like this failed to inspire someone to find something more more fitting:
'Laura looked at the bottled fruits, the sliced pears in syrup, the glistening red plums, the greengages. She thought of the woman who had filled those jars and fastened on the bladders. Perhaps the greengrocer’s mother lived in the country. A solitary old woman picking fruit in a darkening orchard, rubbing her rough fingertips over the smooth-skinned plums, a lean wiry old woman, standing with upstretched arms among her fruit trees as though she were a tree herself, growing out of the long grass, with arms stretched up like branches. It grew darker and darker; still she worked on, methodically stripping the quivering taut boughs one after the other.'
'As Laura stood waiting she felt a great longing. It weighed upon her like the load of ripened fruit upon a tree. She forgot the shop, the other customers, her own errand. She forgot the winter air outside, the people going by on the wet pavements. She forgot that she was in London, she forgot the whole of her London life. She seemed to be standing alone in a darkening orchard, her feet in the grass, her arms stretched up to the pattern of leaves and fruit, her fingers seeking the rounded ovals of the fruit among the pointed ovals of the leaves. The air about her was cool and moist. There was no sound, for the birds had left off singing and the owls had not yet begun to hoot. No sound, except sometimes the soft thud of a ripe plum falling into the grass, to lie there a compact shadow among shadows. The back of her neck ached a little with the strain of holding up her arms. Her fingers searched among the leaves.'
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'Portrait d'Odette Frizac' by Maurice Denis
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'She Knew She Was Right' by Ivy Litvinov (#277)
'These piercing and economical stories, several of which are autobiographical, range from England to Russia and back again, travelling across almost a century. They begin in 1895 with the world seen through Eileen's nursery eyes, progress towards her youth, a loathed clerical job at the Prudential, and her marriage to a Russian émigré with whom she responds to the summons of the Revolution. Moving on to Russia Ivy Litvinov recreates everyday life at a country dacha; the suppressed antagonism between a woman and her dying mother-in-law, and the story of the chuckling Slava who disappears from Moscow without a trace. We are then transported to a very different setting - London of the 1970s, coffee-bar encounters and leisurely family meals. Including two previously uncollected stories, She Knew She Was Right (1971), skilfully and sympathetically delves into the hidden corners of life.'
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'Fraulein Voss' by Manfred Hirzel
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'The Saltzburg Tales' by Christina Stead (#229)
'The old princely city of Salzburg is the setting for the famous Festival where, one August in the 1930s, a group of visitors meet by chance. Amongst them are the Festival Director, small and stout; a Viennese conductor like a tasselled reed; a Scottish doctress, jolly and fresh-complexioned; an Archbishop grey as a gravestone; a Frenchwoman whose conversation dismayed the dull; and an English country gentleman who speaks of foxhounds in unconscious hexameters. These and others pass their free time in telling a rich and varied collection of idealistic and extravagant tales. In its scope, sheer fantasy, and range of characters, 'The Salzburg Tales', first published in 1934, is comparable to 'The Decameron' and 'The Canterbury Tales'.'
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'In Broad Daylight' by Jane Freilicher
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'The Collected Stories' by Katherine Anne Porter (#181)
'Miranda pines for a reality beyond the family myths which surround her, but she is young and naive in thinking she won't ever delude herself: Granny Weatherall, a grande dame of the Old South, drifts into death, recalling a frontier spirit now diminished; and ordinary Mr Thompson, driven to despair on a small Texan farm, discovers his underlying violence. Katherine Anne Porter explores the hostilities which smoulder between parents and children, and the limitations of relationships between husbands, wives and lovers. Contrasted with such introspective characters are those from the Mexican stories of her early career, such as Maria Concepción, embodying the passions and spontaneity of women and men whose experience of life is unquestioning'
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'Portrait of Katherine Mansfield' by Anne Rice
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'The Aloe' by Katherine Mansfield (#174)
'Linda Burnell dreams, listless and distant, whilst downstairs her mother, Mrs Fairchild, sets in order the family's new home in the New Zealand countryside...Her vigorous and exhausting husband, Stanley, is at the office, but will return with eager and admiring eyes...Her children, Kezia, Lottie and Isabel, prepare lunch on a concrete step - daisy-head poached eggs and fuchsia-petal cold meat...Her sister, Beryl, sings love songs to an imaginary young man who will release her from her stifling existence...This is 'The Aloe', the evocative tale of the Burnell family which Katherine Mansfield began writing in 1916 in an attempt to crystallise the memories of her childhood and "make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the old world". It was later reworked and shortened to become her acclaimed 'Prelude'. But this, the original, is very different - in style, detail and texture - giving us both a wonderful short novel and a fascinating insight into a classic of modern literature.'
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I was interested in reading more about the artist and found this on the Museum of New Zealand website. https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/41995
Anne Estelle Rice painted this portrait of the writer Katherine Mansfield in Looe, Cornwall. Mansfield had joined her there for part of the spring and summer of 1918 in hopes of regaining her deteriorating health. Of the occasion of the portrait she wrote, ‘A. came early and began the great painting — me in that red, brick red frock with flowers everywhere. It’s awfully interesting, even now. I painted her in my way as she painted me in hers: her eyes … little blue flowers plucked this morning.’1 Rice, an American by birth, had travelled to Europe for the first time in 1906. She met Mansfield in her Paris studio, and the two women became close friends.
Strong colours, an emphasis on line, and the use of pattern repeated over the entire surface are the main features of Portrait of Katherine Mansfield. The predominant colour was suggested by Mansfield who, like Rice, loved red. The colour is used expressively, its vibrant intensity enhanced by the contrasting green shadows on neck and hands.
There are no softened outlines, and contours are left boldly as literal lines at the jaw and ear, and around the figure’s left leg and hip. Rice was unconcerned with ‘finish’, and the raw canvas shows through in places, as does the under-drawing. Nor is there any of the fine detailing of face and hands found in conventional portraiture. Rice’s main concern was the integration of the figure with the background, and she achieved this by bringing the background forward, the repeating floral patterns of a jug of flowers, wallpaper — or maybe a patterned shawl — drawing attention to the surface.
Rice’s style was formed in Paris, where from 1907 she was part of the circle around Scottish expatriate artists John D Fergusson and Samuel John Peploe. She quickly absorbed the expressive colour of the fauve painters, including their method of juxtaposing primary and secondary colours. Her innate feeling for decorative line and pattern was also stimulated by the brilliant costumes and sets of the Ballets Russes.
Vicki Robson
This essay appears in Art at Te Papa, (Te Papa Press, 2009).
1. Katherine Mansfield, letter to John Middleton Murray, 17 June 1918, cited in Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott (eds), The collected letters of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 2 (1918–1919), Clarendon Press, Oxford, and Oxford University Press, New York, 1987, pp. 244–45.
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I love the painting too and am glad that it hangs in New Zealand's National Gallery - though that rather crushes my ambition to see it one day.
There is another Virago cover painting in the Te Papa collection that I tracked down recently ...
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'Costumes pour un ensemble' by Bernard Boutet de Monvel
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The Little Ottleys by Ada Leverson (#98)
'The heroine of the three novels collected here--'Love's Shadow', 'Tenterhooks', and 'Love at Second Sight' --is the delightful Edith Ottley. As we follow Edith's fortunes we enter the enchanting world of Edwardian London. We will be bewitched by the courtships, jealousies, and love affairs of Edith's coterie--and indeed of Edith herself--and unfailingly amused by her husband, Bruce, one of the most tremendous--if attractive--bores in literature.'
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Madame de Chauffe by John Callcott Horsely
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Salem Chapel by Mrs Oliphant (#228)
'Arthur Vincent, "fresh from Homerton, in the bloom of hope and intellectualism", arrives in Carlingford to take up the reins as Dissenting minister of Salem Chapel. A mixture of hope and ignorance prompts him to imagine that he will take his place amongst the cream of Carlingford society. But a six-o'clock tea at the home of Mr. Tozer the butterman, senior deacon of the Chapel, throws cold water on the young man's aspirations. For there he meets Mrs. Tozer and her daughter Phoebe, "pink, plump and full of dimples", and his congregation of greengrocers, dealers in cheese and bacon, milkmen, dressmakers and teachers of day-schools. To add to his problems he falls head-over-heels in love with "a beautiful, dazzling creature", Lady Western, only to find himself caught up in a crime most horrible to contemplate...'
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'Froanna - Portrait of the Artist's Wife' by P Wyndham Lewis
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I'm Not Complaining by Ruth Adam (#124)
'Madge Brigson is a teacher in a Nottinghamshire elementary school in England in the 1930s. Here, with her colleagues - the beautiful, "promiscuous" Jenny, the ardent communist Freda, and the kind, spinsterish Miss Jones - she battles with the trials and tribulations of their special world: abusive parents, eternal malnutrition, inspectors' visits, staff quarrels and love affairs. To all this Madge presents an uncompromisingly intelligent and commonsensical face: laughter is never far away as she copes with her pupils, the harsh circumstances of life in the Depression, and her own love affair. For Madge is a true heroine: determined, perceptive, warm-hearted; she deals with life, and love, unflinchingly, and gets the most out of the best - and worst - of it.'
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The Artist's Wife Mornington Crescent by Spencer Gore
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Poor Caroline by Winifred Holtby (#192)
'Caroline Denton-Smyth is an eccentric, remarkable for her vivid costumes trailing feathers, fancy beads and jingling lorgnettes. Sitting alone in her West Kensington bedsitter, she dreams of the Christian Cinema Company - her vehicle for reform. For Caroline sees herself as a pioneer, one who must risk everything in the "Cause of Right". Her Board of Directors are a motley crew; Basil St. Denis, upper crust but impecunious; Joseph Isenbaum, aspiring to Society and Eton for his son; Eleanor de la Roux, Caroline's independent, left-wing cousin from South Africa; Hugh Macafee, a curt Scottish film technician; young Father Mortimer, scarred from the First World War; and Clifton Johnson, seedy American scenario writer on the make.'
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Mandoa' left to read.
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'Mrs Fairbairn' (Nancy Cunard) by Alvaro Guevara
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'Pirates at Play' by Violet Trefusis (#416)
'Set in the frenetic, fantastical Twenties, this romantic comedy begins as Elizabeth Caracole (pronounced 'Crackle') is sent by her aristocratic parents to be finished in Florence with the family of a Papal count - and Papal dentist. There are no less than five sons, as well as the beautiful ambitious Vica, who has plans of her own. As does the formidable old Principessa Arrivamale - for her nephew, Gian Galeazzo. The arrival of two Englishmen sets in motion an intricate emotional dance which weaves around Italy and England, and includes a vivid and splendid cast of supporting characters.'
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'At Home, a Portrait' by Walter Crane
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'Marcella' by Mrs Humphrey Ward (#155)
'Marcella Boyce, a Pre-Raphaelite beauty of the 1880s, is passionately in love with the ideals of socialism. A 21-year-old art student, she lives in a Kensington boarding house until her father inherits the family estate, Mellor Park, in the Midlands. Leaving her studies, her philanthropic work in the East End, and the company of her Bohemian friends, she embarks on her new life at Mellor Park, determined to alleviate the poverty she sees around her. Then Aldous Raeburn, Tory candidate and heir to Lord Maxwell's estate, falls in love with Marcella. But Marcella is torn between her longing to become mistress of Maxwell Court and her burning idealism. Before she can reconcile the two, Marcella must learn - through bitter experience - the real barriers that divide one human from another.'