The subconscious is what this show is all about and obviously it is hard to curate. Yet as Ali Smith writes in the New Statesman: ‘It’s when the exhibition lets Woolf go, doesn’t fuss with quotes or inferences, that Woolf most appears in it and the curation comes together, especially via one or two brilliant choices… there’s the witty liberation in Birgit Jurgenssen’s spelling-out with her body and her spirit what a woman is and isn’t in Housewives’ Kitchen Apron (1975).’

Representing the domestic space: Vanessa Bell Interior with a Table, oil paint on canvas © Tate was painted at St Tropez in 1921.

A new show at the Pallant in Chichester – Virginia Woolf An Exhibition Inspired By Her Writings – must have been a challenge for the curator since so many of the paintings have become deeply familiar over the last couple of decades. But in fact there is a lot to surprise us and even more to inform us. The exhibition, which was at Tate St Ives and moves on to the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, is at the Pallant until mid September. ‘There are four sections – broadly on landscape, domestic spaces, the subconscious and the public display of gender and identity’ (Joe Lloyd, here).For the first section: this is Dora Carrington’s Spanish Landscape with Mountains c. 1924. Oil paint on canvas, Tate.

Mollie Panter-Downes wrote in May 1944: ‘Londoners were last week introduced to an architectural blueprint of what large areas of Britain are going to look like after the war. The first of Mr Churchill’s promised prefabricated steel houses for newlyweds has, like a squat mushroom, suddenly sprung up in the shadow of the Tate Gallery…It is being emphasized that such houses represent only a temporary solution of the postwar housing problem which, on this bombed island, will certainly be acute.’ The author of London at War, Alan Jeffreys, writes: ‘Many people would go on to live happily in prefabs for decades afterwards, as the structures long outlived their “temporary” purpose.’ (And many people would love to be living in them still.)

Mollie Panter-Downes described VE Day at length to her American readers. ‘With their customary practicality, housewives put bread before circuses. They waited in the long bakery queues, the string bags of the common round in one hand and the Union Jack of the glad occasion in the other. Even queues seemed tolerable this morning. The bells had begun to peal and, after the storm, London was having a perfect, hot, English summer’s day.’

‘Just like other civilians, writers were required to contribute to the war effort. That took its toll on their creative efforts, according to Mollie Panter-Downes (11 March 1945): “During the war years, more and more Londoners have taken to reading poetry, listening to music, and going to art exhibitions, although there is less and less of all three to be had in this shabby, weary capital. Most of the poets are too personally involved in the war to have attained that state of impersonal tranquillity which generates good poetry. Louis MacNeice, whose most recent collection Springboard was quickly sold out, is working at the BBC. C Day Lewis has a job at the Ministry of Information. Stephen Spender is a full-time fireman, and most of the younger poets are in uniform. Several have been killed, among them Alun Lewis, who was considered one of the most promising. The output of good poetry is small, but the public hunger for it is pathetically great.”‘ The photograph is of Henry Green in his Auxiliary Fire Service uniform. (Two Persephone-related points: one of our preface writers, Juliet Aykroyd, has written a superb play about Alun Lewis (which had its first reading in the shop last year): The Long Bones is to be on at Pentameters in the second two weeks of June. And Henry Green was the uncle by marriage of ‘country cousin’ who writes the Forum!)

Fishmongers Hall 1942: a self service canteen run by  the Londoners Meals Service where a two course meal was a shilling. London at War quotes Mollie Panter-Downes on 10 August 1941: ‘The classic English topic of conversation, the weather, has vanished for the duration…Everyone talks about Food. An astonishing amount of people’s time is occupied by discussing ways and means of making rations go further…’