Carole by Anne Finlay is undated, it’s at Orleans House Gallery in Richmond (Surrey) and was presented by the artist after the death of the painter Philip Connard, with whom she lived in Richmond.

The Skipping Rope 1952 is at the Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture. What a clever painting! Not a bit kitsch and with such life and wonderful colour. And there is the mother reading again. Anne Finlay is definitely one of our new very favourite painters.

Why isn’t this painting better known? It says so much. Anne Finlay’s A Woman’s Life 1938, again at Leamington Spa. Apparently this is a ‘study’ (perhaps a chalk drawing?). Please will any Leamington Spa Persephone reader go and pay homage to it!

‘Country Cousin’ who writes the Forum found a marvellous painting to illustrate Enid Bagnold’s The Squire – it’s by Anne Finlay(1898-1963), of whom regretfully we had never heard. So she is the subject of the Post this week. Here are some details about her. This is Ronnie at Bedtime 1935, a painting full of fascinating detail; it’s at Leamington Spa Art Gallery. And here is the link to the Forum with the painting of The Baby.

Finally: the perfect thing to say as you hand a wedge of cheese and some biscuits to a couple who are apparently in evening dress. Marghanita Laski was catty and kind in equal measures, but always funny, wise and perceptive. And profound.  Apologies is in the shop, do ask to look at it if you come in before Christmas. (Also, it was a pity in a way that she wrote an article in the TLS in the early 1970s, just after Virago had been launched, deploring the existence of a women-only publishing house. She used the same argument as the women who didn’t want the vote, who wanted to change the system, not accept the system but modify it: Marghanita hoped that one day there would be no need for a women-only publisher, for male and female writers to be treated equally. One can  see her point, but…)

This is on the cover, unsurprisingly. The heading, ‘I may be only your mother, but’ is the stuff of several Persephone novels (Hostages to Fortune, Family Roundabout, Princes in the Land and more) and is both funny and painful; it includes such ouch phrases as ‘I’m not a hotel-keeper”, ‘it wouldn’t hurt you to be a bit more kind’ and ‘I’ve been to school too’. Every single phrase has been thought at some point by every single mother in the world but (ideally) never said. Or only in total extremis. (Notice the details: the girls clothes, the expression on her face of half amazement, half horror, the mother’s carefully curled hair, and the ancestral portrait behind her.)

‘TV – well, actually yes, but only because – of the children, more and more people are, I’ve a friend in the trade, of things like the Coronation, one can knit at the same time, it’s easier than talking’ etc.