As we move towards the day with the least daylight, the luminous paintings of Anna Ancher (1859-1935) provide a lovely corrective, so we shall have five on the Post this week. The first-ever UK exhibition of this Danish painter is now open at Dulwich Picture Gallery (until 8th March 2026), and it includes The Maid in the Kitchen (1883-86) of which Laura Cumming writes, "Yellow-gold light dances through a fine muslin curtain across the window, illuminating the surfaces, glowing against walls, pooling on the wooden floor".

Frances Spalding (b 1950) is the art historian biographer of several important Bloomsbury figures whose lives and work are closely interwoven with Persephone Books. Her subjects include Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and Gwen Raverat who provided the delightful illustrations for The Runaway. She has also written a biography of John Minton who captured the essence of Elizabeth David's writing in his 1950s book covers and illustrations. 

All the eminent female biographers on the Post this week have overlaps not only with authors and subjects in Persephone books, but also in the wider interests and causes we support. Claire Tomalin (b 1933) is the biographer of Katherine Mansfield, and of Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft - without whom the literary and philiosophical landscapes would be very different. She also broke new ground with her book about Ellen Ternan which revised the widely accepted thinking about her relationship with Charles Dickens. 

A great biography takes risks and can alter and reshape long-held views about its subject's life and achievements. Fiona MacCarthy (1940-2020) certainly did this with her biography of Eric Gill published in 1990. She also wrote superb, immensely readable biographies of "outsider creators and their difficult choices", including William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Stanley Spencer, and Walter Gropius.

The subject on the Post this week is biography, specifically five of the best C20 and C21 female biographers whose books have made significant contributions to the understanding of their subjects' lives and expanded the concept of biography with modern ideas of life-writing. We begin with Hermione Lee (b 1948) whose acclaimed biography (1996) of Virginia Woolf "moves freely between a richly detailed life-story and new attempts to understand crucial questions".  She has also written biographies of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Elizabeth Bowen.

A hundred years on and despite peaks, troughs, and threats to its existence, cinema is not dead. Indeed, cinemas still opening all the time, but now you longer have to queue outside in the rain or sit with 3,000 other people, many of whom smoke during the film. There are plenty of small, independent or community cinemas, such as The Electric Picture Palace in Southwold, the Kino housed in the former Rye Library (1850s, above), and the Showroom Cinema in Sheffield in a former 1936 car dealership building.