By popular demand: more photographs of our authors on the Post this week. This is Betty Miller (1910-65) in Rottingdean with her husband Emanuel in 1938. Her novel Farewell Leicester Square (1941), PB No. 15, is about a Jewish film-maker in London in the 1930s but begins in Sussex; Alec Berman grows up on the Western Road in Hove, dreaming of working on film sets whilst his brother plays in the arcades on the Brighton Pier. One of Betty Miller’s grandsons has written a new memoir, so you can read more about some of her descendants in the Observer here. (Betty and Emanuel had a daughter, Sarah, and a son, the opera director Jonathan Miller).

Winifred Watson (born in 1907 and brought up in Newcastle), author of the book which remains our bestseller Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day; the film of which was released almost exactly ten years ago in August 2008. A reminder that the radio adaptation is currently up on BBC iPlayer, read brilliantly by Maureen Lipman.

Here Jocelyn Playfair (1904-96) looks very much the daughter of a Lieutenant-Colonel and wife of a decorated Major-General; scarf neatly tied, not a hair out of place. Yet her novel, PB No. 32 A House in the Country (1942), is a careful questioning of why countries go to war. Written, of course, in the moment of a global war when no-one knew what the outcome would be. It’s also incredibly romantic. Why oh why hasn’t it been adapted for the screen?

This photograph of Dorothy Canfield Fisher (1879-1958) is in fact up on the website. It is also reprinted in both the grey and the classic edition of her book PB No.7 The Home-maker so most readers of the Persephone Post will have seen it before. But in all honesty we couldn’t not put it up again here because it is such a captivating photograph. Incidentally, we have written up The Home-maker for the Toast website which is full of captivating photographs too… we have decided that we’ll be wearing long belted skirts and fair isle sweaters come autumn.

Thea Holme (1904-1980) started her career as an actress: after studying at the Slade she went to the Central School of Drama and, in 1924, made her first stage appearance. In the 1930s she was in repertory at the Oxford Playhouse, with her husband Stanford Holme as producer. She was a captivating actress, ‘hard indeed of heart was the undergraduate who did not fall madly in love with this most elegant beauty with the wondering eyes’ (The Times obituary). They later moved to number 5 (now 24) Cheyne Row and became co-custodians of the house (which you can, and must, visit). Here she wrote PB No.32 The Carlyles at Home, about the life of Thomas and Jane Carlyle when they were at the centre of literary Victorian London. Significantly, Holme also focused on the lives of the various maids and cooks who lived with and worked for the Carlyles, including poor Kirkaldy Helen who drinks potent combinations of gin and rum and the devoted Bessy Barnet who only leaves to marry the ‘second son of a baronet’.

August is the quiet month at Persephone Books, allowing for a (very) small amount of filing and organising. Sorting through the folders labelled ‘Author pics’ we have re-discovered some excellent images, lots of which we haven’t used on the website before. So this week the Post is dedicated to a completely random selection of just five of ‘our’ authors; all of whom we are equally proud to publish. First is Cicely Hamilton (1872-1952), author of PB 1: William – an Englishman, in costume for A Pageant of Great Women (1910) which can be read here.

Mary Cassatt Children Playing on the Beach 1884. Some of us are off to Dorset to indulge in this. Lydia and Phoebe are in the office and then they too are allowed to go on holiday.