We must ignore the wreath on the door (because actually it's a Christmas wreath) and concentrate on the jackets and scarves and satchel hanging on the brass hooks. The Frenchness is in the beautiful metalwork on the front door; but the clothes on the hooks are timelessly beautiful.. Everything, inside and out in the buildings, streets and squares of this small French town, is delightful. One day Kate Mears will, we hope, turn these five paintings, and many more in the same vein, into a 'year in Provence' type book. We greatly look forward to it.

Nothing needs to be said about this marvellous painting by Kate Mears except – can't you just feel the gentle breeze coming in through the window and can't you just imagine picking up the book briefly abandoned on the arm of the chair, probably while the reader went to get a cup of coffee.

This riverside villa would be the perfect base for a month's holiday reading, going to the river for a quick swim, cooking wonderful food from the market – asparagus, mushrooms (chanterelles in the autumn), peaches. Dream on as they say. But then it's not so shabby in Bath, it's just France is so inimitably wonderful.

This painting is called 'The Morning Room'. Is it because we now don't have 'morning rooms' in Britain or is it something about the standard lamp or the chandelier, but somehow one knows this room is in France. Mais pourquoi? Maybe we can smell the café au lait and taste the baguette; or simply imagine we are on the sofa reading Le Figaro or Le Monde. 

This week on the Post we are either actually on holiday (Jane who usually writes the Post is in Japan amassing 1001 ideas to do with design and culture and music and literature and food) or imagining we are on holiday. So if we go with the imagining, this week we are in a small town in France, courtesy of a Persephone reader who moved there from Somerset five years ago and has been writing 'A Year in France', with marvellous watercolours and aperçus. Isn't this just la France typique? How people who can paint manage it the rest of us simply can't imagine, but somehow a few details and swishes of colour – and we might as well be there.

Mrs Henry Wood, as Ellen Wood (1814-97) was known, wrote to in order to support her family after the failure of husband's business. Her conventional married name belied the shockingly racy but enthralling contents which were typical of the "sensation novel" of the mid-Victorian era. Ellen Wood wrote more than thirty novels, sold six million books and, like  later authors such as Jilly Cooper, knew that sex and scandal were reliable money-spinners. This is the 1884 frontispiece of East Lynne (1861), one of the most successful novels of the period.

We publish The Mystery of Mrs Blencarrow which contains two novellas by Mrs Oliphant (1828-97) who was stupendously prolific; Sarah Harkness calls her "the patron saint of the overworked single parent". Like all the Victorian writers on the Post this week, her work rate and output were extraordinary. She supported her family after her husband died leaving debts, but her life was blighted by domestic tragedy (she outlived all of her six children). She moved to Windsor in 1866 to be near to her two sons who were at Eton, and lived there for the rest of her life. Here she is in 1874 on the steps of her house in Clarence Crescent with her sons and nephew.