Monica Dance (1913-98) was the first profoundly influential woman in the conservation movement which began in the 1960s (and of which our own The Sack of Bath is part). She worked at the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings from 1939 to 1978 and made every effort to save Methwold Old Vicarage, Norfolk, which had become tenements for four families, each with a living room and larder and two bedrooms and a communal tap outside. In 1964 she and her husband Harry were able to buy it and set about restoring it with characteristic sensitivity. It was bequeathed to the SPAB, who approached the Landmark Trust for help. More details of the Old Vicarage here and here.    

A Bank Holiday weekend at a Landmark Trust house got us thinking about Landmark and – women. Without wanting to be absurd or exaggerated, there is no better way to put this: reading through  Landmark: A History of Britain in Fifty Buildings by Anna Keay and Caroline Stanford (2015) it was extremely hard to find any mention at all of half the human race. Houses were built by men. We know that women 'ran' them. But they are invisible. Something we have taken for granted all our life was suddenly enraging. We know, for example, that Elizabethan women carried the keys to the larders and pantries, grew the herbs, looked after the family's clothes, and of course bore the children. But where are they now? So this week on the Post: four Landmark houses that remind us, or should, or fail to, that half the human race ever existed. First of all, the first Landmark ever: Church Cottage,  Cardiganshire bought by Sir John Smith in 1965 and still available for holidays, details here.  But you will search in vain for any mention of the women who lived in it during its one hundred years as a simple domestic dwelling. This is not to denigrate Landmark, which is a totally admirable organisation and in fact, in a far, far larger way does exactly what we try to do at Persephone: rescue the forgotten. It is simply making a plea to remember our female ancestors; while recognising the difficulties of doing so when there is no evidence, no documentation, no monuments or memorials, to remember them by.

Violet Pinwill (1874-1957) is known as one of the most distinguished local wood carvers of the late Victorian era. She began wood working when her father, the vicar of Ermington, secured funds for the restoration of the church, and her mother hired an instructor to teach their seven daughters wood working. Pinwill later formed a wood carving company with two of her sisters. (Shouldn't someone be writing a novel about the seven wood working girls?!) 

Daisy Borne (1906-1998) was a Londoner who, after being  educated in America,  studied sculpture at Regent Street Polytechnic School of Art. For many years she shared a studio with Joyce Bidder in southwest London, and showed at the  Royal Academy from1932–61. Madonna of the Adoring Angels (1939) was her first in Palomino marble and first religious subject (a theme in which she would later specialise).

Anne Acheson (1882-1962) first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1913, when her sculpture The Pixie was accepted. Over the next four decades, thirty of her sculptures were featured in twenty-two exhibitions at the Academy. Her work included statuettes, portrait heads, and garden figurines; her early works were sculpted from wood, her later sculptures were largely done in metal, stone or concrete. But, as a reader of the Post wrote to us yesterday, although she was an excellent sculptress we remember and honour her  nowadays for being: 'the inventor of the plaster cast and thus for the healing of every broken bone around the world... during the First World War she realised that plaster of Paris could be moulded exactly to fit a broken bone and hold it in place while it healed.' There was a television documentary about her work helping the wounded (alas currently unavailable, why?). Here is an informative piece about her work.

Mary Spencer Watson (1913-2006) was not only a marvellous sculptor she was also a thoroughly admirable person – she left her family home, Dunshay Manor, to The Landmark Trust so that the rest of us can rent it for the weekend or week and really this is an amazing thing to do. Here is a 1944 bust of Julia Pleister and here is a piece about Spencer Watson.

This week on the Post, five female sculptors, five chosen from among thousands for the simple reason that we love their work and would like them to have more attention. First Ellen Mary Rope, who did incredible work, and in particular Demeter and Persephone (1889); lots more detail about her life and work here;