Since 1975 Annie Ernaux has lived in Cergy-Pontoise, a new town 30km north west of Paris,  (above, Hôtel de préfecture du Val-d'Oise, opened 1970). As the author of this article says, "Ernaux’s insistence that we find a key to unlock the secrets of modern social and emotional lives in the new-town grocery queue, the hairdresser’s salon, or the crowded Tube carriage, counts as a quietly revolutionary act". For her, “a supermarket can provide just as much meaning and truth as a concert hall”, words which are underlined by the Nobel citation, “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”

Les Années (2008, translated as The Years, 2018) a good place to begin with Annie Ernaux' work. Although it is often categorised as autofiction, Ernaux rejects this label, saying that she brings together both the personal and the collective. Such is her ability to condense the 'lived dimension of history' from 1940 to 2006, non-French readers will also recognise so much of the postwar evolution and detail. Les Années is published by Gallimard as part of its classic Collection Blanche which, like Persephone Books, uses the same instantly recognisable cover design for every book in the series.

Annie Ernaux was, as she says, educated out of her social milieu. Like one of her greatest literary influences, Simone de Beauvoir, she struggled to be a 'jeune fille rangée' or dutiful daughter. She writes vividly about her parents and the enclosed world of their épicerie-mercerie-café in Yvetot in La Place (1983, trans as A Man's Place) and Une femme (1987). Ernaux later studied in Rouen, where de Beauvoir had taught at the Lycée Jeanne d'Arc from 1932 to 1941. (Visitors to Rouen today can have a coffee at de Beauvoir and Sartre's preferred cafe, Le Métropole (1932, above), near the fabulous late Art Nouveau railway station.)

Annie Ernaux was born in 1940 in Lillebonne, a small town on the Seine, but grew up in Yvetot a rather insular, isolated market town, also in Normandy, which was badly damaged during the Second World War. Her early memories of Yvetot contained in her work eg Les Années/The Years are of a ruined town being reconstructed. They echo the images of a blasted post-war France so hauntingly evoked in Little Boy Lost.

Annie Ernaux (b1940) has become the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and only the seventeenth woman to win it since 1901. With her elegant, dépouillé or sparse, stripped back style, her work is a pleasure to read in French, but her books can be read in English translations which were recently, and with commendable foresight, commissioned by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

'La Récureuse' (trans. scourer or scrubber, 1737, Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris) by André Bouys (1655-1740) is a rare painting of someone polishing silver. Yet this was once a regular part of cleaning in every household which owned silverware. It was also time-consuming. This is why Mollie Panter-Downes, in One Fine Day and Minnie’s Room, uses polishing silver as an example of what no-one has time for after the war when they no longer have servants.

Perfectly polished silver tea and coffee services were, at one time, the epitome of elegance and sophistication, but not necessarily comfort. All the drawing-room formality, politeness and etiquette which Vera Brittain wanted to escape from in Buxton as recalled in Testament of Youth (1933) is illustrated here in 'Interior: The Orange Blind' (c1927, Kelvingrove) by FCB Cadell (1883-1937).