Having seen that photograph of thousands and thousands of Palestinians walking back to northern Gaza, most of us will have found it very hard to go on unconcernedly with our everyday lives. And walking to what? No plumbing, no electricity, no houses, just rubble and chaos. Also it is difficult, in fact impossible, to forget the statistic about how many children have been killed.

So how can one write a ‘Letter’ about art exhibitions and prizewinning buildings and what's happening on The Archers (see below) when people exactly like us are living in the chaos? It’s the great conundrum of our times. (Because the 'news' is so ever present on our television screens and our phones – it used to be easier to ignore.) No one wants to harp on and on about politics, but nor do we want to be callous – normal life must go on (apparently). Nevertheless, we want to make the point that here at Persephone Books we are as concerned, and as confused, as you are. 

The art exhibition we recommend showcases the work of a great favourite of ours, Denton Welch, and it’s at John Swarbrooke Fine Art until October 30th. Welch was an excellent writer – some of his books are in print – but his painting was sublime. Our favourite by him is this beautiful Shell Poster of Hadlow Tower in Kent (suggestions please for which future Persephone Classic could be illustrated by the couple on the left) and the photographs of the exhibition venue here show the original Hadlow painting hanging over a mantelpiece. There is a comprehensive catalogue available called Strange Discoveries. And Alan Hollinghurst wrote about Welch here.

Welch died in 1948, revered by some as much as Eric Ravilious (d.1942) and Rex Whistler (d. 1944) – and wouldn't this trio of contemporary geniuses make a good book? 

At Tate Britain there is a stunningly comprehensive retrospective of Lee Miller’s work. 'In July 1944, Miller was allowed to join the Allied forces liberating Western Europe. She spent the next year and a half roaming the continent and documenting the aftermath of Nazi rule, singling out female victims and perpetrators in particular and questioning whether, in wartime, anyone could truly be an innocent onlooker. Her images of nurses working on the front line, concentration camp prostitutes, and lone women refugees with their children, are vital records of war her male colleagues didn’t or wouldn’t seek out; they are also among the most extraordinary images Miller ever created' (Aperture). Here is 'Two German women sitting on a park bench surrounded by destroyed buildings, Cologne, Germany' 1945 © Lee Miller Archives.

       Thrillingly, the Stirling Prize for Architecture was awarded to something beautiful, which just shows modern architecture doesn’t have to be ugly: Appleby Blue Almshouse in south London, designed by Witherford Watson Mann. The Guardian wrote: ‘Appleby Blue is a retort to the prevalent notion that older people should be shunted to the urban and sociocultural margins… By reimagining later living as a collective experience, it draws its residents together in a building that elevates the everyday.’ It sounds magical.

When we put a plea on the Letter for recommendations of what to watch, a kind reader suggested  A Family at War (1970-71) tracing the lives of a Liverpool family during World War II. It is very soapy (as in soap opera) but addictive in a good way and has a wonderful tone rather like PB no.9 Few Eggs and No Oranges. (We have been watching dvd's but have finally realised it's available on You Tube, which is cheaper and easier.) While on the subject of soaps: there has been some discussion about whether George Grundy on R4's The Archers will come good or not. Judging by Sunday night's episode he will not, as we heard him bluster, be aggressive, insensitive, and generally (on day three after he emerged from prison) making a lot of people in the village angry and upset – rather than keeping very, very quiet for several weeks and then gently asking for forgiveness. That can't now happen.

American readers: who would you choose as the greatest American women writer? Edith Wharton? Willa Cather? Louisa M Alcott? Shirley Jackson? None of them. The greatest by far is Dorothy Canfield Fisher. One day this will be recognised, but for now we have to accept she is barely heard of in America, vague (but nonsensical) accusations of eugenics are thrown at her, and a century after her best novels – PB no.7 The Home-Maker (1924) and PB no. 140 The Deepening Stream (1930) – were published, there is still no proper biography and not nearly enough recognition of her genius. But the good news is that a Persephone reader, an academic at Edinburgh, Katie Harling-Lee, has been awarded a three year British Academy post-doctoral fellowship for a project investigating Quaker silence in her novels. The proposal ends pleasingly: 'In re-assessing Canfield Fisher, I revise her place in modernist scholarship, and consider the wider cultural significance of silence in the suffrage age.' Revise her place indeed.  

And of course, cf. the first paragraph, we could tell ourselves we are doing something simply by bringing books like PB no. 152 Crooked Cross back into print. This week Charlotte Higgins said in a long piece about the book in the Guardian: ‘What is so impressive about Sally Carson is, despite the fact she had no idea where Hitlerism would end, the novel has an unshakeable moral core. There is no equivocation. What is being done in Germany to Jews, to communists, is plainly horrific.’ Nevertheless, since we also publish light-hearted ‘good reads’, thrillers, cookery books etc, we cannot pretend that our motives are as morally focused as, say, Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club or the Gay Men’s Press; they aren’t, and in fact we try very hard to have a good mix of the important and the unimportant, the serious and the fun and so on. The upsetting relevance of Crooked Cross to 2025 is partly chance and partly (sorry to boast) clever publishing. But of course we have no illusions that politicians will read it. They didn’t in 1934 and they won’t now. That was what was extraordinary about Obama – he actually reads books, and publishes a list of his favourites every year – whereas politicians never read novels, nor (sadly) do the majority of historians. So, no, we are only doing our bit in a very small way. But at least we aren’t blind, and we force some people to confront things they might not otherwise.

This month the charities we have supported include the Saraswati Scholarship Fund which helps young people in India to continue their education in order to become doctors, engineers or midwives and an organisation which gives a voice to the women of Afghanistan.

Melvyn Bragg is retiring from In Our Time and the programme won a medal; three great people died in the last month: Nicholas Grimshaw, Jilly Cooper and Jane Goodall, we mourn all three of them; and, excitingly, Jen Campbell wrote about our books and about Fran in Toast Magazine.

As sponsors of the Tirzah Garwood exhibition we were sent the exhibition report by Dulwich Picture Gallery and were very pleased to read that over 60,000 tickets were sold, ‘making it one of the Gallery’s most popular exhibitions in recent years’; there were many repeat visits and over 1000 copies of PB no. 119 Long Live Great Bardfield were sold in their shop. For anyone who wishes they had got to the exhibition and couldn't, we wholeheartedly recommend the Catalogue which is beautifully done. The Times said, ‘Next time you face a wet afternoon in Croydon or anywhere else, read Tirzah Garwood’s memoir in the Persephone Books edition. The early chapters about her childhood are a perfect period piece.’ (This seems rather hard on people who live in Croydon, in fact it makes the writer of this Letter think of her mother since she often used to say, ‘I won’t have snobbery about parts of London’  – should us children refer to e.g. Penge in a disparaging way.) 

On Substack Jane Brocket addressed the subject of smocking: it doesn’t sound fascinating, but goodness it absolutely is, and she  visited V and A East (we still haven't been, but it's obviously amazing) to inspect – smocks. Jane’s December 6th talk about Christmas is virtually sold out (there are still tickets for the other events) but with any luck some of what she says will be used by her on the Post itself.

Valerie Waterhouse will be giving an online talk about Malachi Whitaker on Saturday 25th October, and of course we are looking forward to her biography of this wonderful writer. The audience at her talk is meant to be armed with our edition of the stories, PB no. 124 The Journey Home. 

Finally, do try and read an extraordinary book by Phyllis Rose (author of the excellent Parallel Lives) called The Shelf. There is a subscription library in New York (rather like the London Library) and here she decided to read through one entire shelf of books rather at random. She chose LEO to LES and what she found prompted her to write her book. It includes a chapter about why there were only three women writers (out of eleven in total) on the shelf. She covers all the issues that we write about so often and does so very entertainingly eg ‘as a young woman I identified with Dorothea Brooke, Isabel Archer and Elizabeth Bennet, but not Lord Jim, nor Gatsby, nor Nick Adams [me too, but apparently he is a Hemingway character]. Yet I was asked by teachers and professors to read books about men as though their gender were unimportant.’ Very very true.

Nicola Beauman

8 Edgar Buildings

Bath