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).

Silver-plated breakfast tureens, as sold by the likes of Mappin & Webb, were once a staple of breakfast tables in genteel households which might have employed a maid and a cook who prepared kippers, kedgeree, and devilled kidneys. This could be the sort of welcoming breakfast table at which Louisa presides in Greenbanks: fresh bread and flowers, eggs and fruit, a Brown Betty teapot, and various pieces of silverware in a light-filled room. This is 'Breakfast is Ready' (c1919) by Stanley Thorogood (1873-1953) who became superintendent of art instruction for Stoke-on-Trent. Hence, perhaps, the good quality tableware. It is in The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery.