This week we have writers who also quilt. Rural Hours by Harriet Baker examines the lives of three writers during the time they spent in the English countryside, and includes two Persephone authors: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Townsend Warner. There are fascinating details of STW's daily domestic life and of her interest in patchwork; here she is in bed in her Dorset cottage with one of her quilts. Quilting also inspired her work: her short story The Widow's Quilt (1977) opens in 'the quilt room' in the American Museum in Bath, which has a superb collection.

In The Village, Marghanita Laski uses the decorative arts to great, clever, and sometimes comic effect and to illustrate the village’s elaborately calibrated social stratification. Retired headmistress Miss Porteous is creating a William Morris-style home by acquiring Arts and Crafts pieces (she even calls her house 'Kelmscott' after the original, above), so is taken aback to discover that ex-trade Miss Moodie lives with genuine, inherited A&C furniture. "Miss Moodie’s room was not so very different to the sort of room she had chosen for herself. The walls had been distempered a nice warm cream, the curtains at the casement windows were of that charming mock cross stitch mock Jacobean linen, and the furniture instead of being the tightly-stuffed elaborately veneered walnut most tradespeople bought consisted of what Miss Porteous immediately sized up as A Few Good Pieces – a small gate-leg table, a long rush-seated oak stool, a painted pine corner cupboard which was surely some genuine old lustre china inside".

In Out of the Window, the stark contrast between Ursula's large, pale, comfortable home in a Cheshire village and 53 Shakespeare Street in a Manchester terrace, where Mrs Gandy and her son Kenneth live, is vividly drawn by Madeline Linford. Readers know exactly where they are with details such as the "two saffron yellow steps", the lino in the hall, the centre table in the parlour with "a paperweight of mottled granite, an India rubber plant and an album of Southport views’, and the parlour window itself "modestly veiled in Nottingham lace...parted and looped to display an aspidistra in a painted china pot". (This is The Aspidistra (c1912, Bristol) by Jean Marchand).

They Were Sisters is a superb but sometimes difficult read because of the brilliantly drawn character of Geoffrey. Dorothy Whipple's choice of domestic detail is masterful, and reveals all we need to know about him. "It was a man’s house". Charlotte, his wife, "had given in to Geoffrey in everything, even the furnishing of the house". "There was something hotel-like in Geoffrey’s taste" and the living room resembles a "bar-parlour with drinks perpetually on the sideboard, quantities of brass, jokes on the poker-work and pottery tobacco-jars, pipe-racks, spill-holders, ash-trays and calendars, jokes of the irate, purple-faced colonel and comic curate variety". (This is a still from the 1945 film with James Mason as a suitably menacing Geoffrey.)

"Furniture goes with ways of living," says Delia in The New House, reflecting in the 1930s on Victorian houses cluttered with things that were outdated or serving no useful purpose. Instead, she "knew what she wanted for her flat, despised Evelyn's pouffes and cretonnes, and meant to have plain, pale wood, with bowls of jade and green, and heaps of cushions, raspberry red, silver green, and the deep, blue-purple of anemones". This type of vivid, modern, unstuffy decor is exactly what we find in paintings such as Lunch (1918, private collection) by Harold Harvey. 

This week we have examples of the decorative arts in Persephone Books. Domestic interiors, objects, and design schemes are used by authors to guide the reader, reveal character and situation, and reflect the times and fashions of their era. This painting, The Artist's Wife (c1935) by Gerald Gardiner (1902-59, The Wilson), is how we might imagine Celia's warm, comfortable front room in the family's suburban semi in They Knew Mr Knight. With its lively fire, glass-fronted bookcase, and hyacinth bowls on the windowsill, it reflects her ‘capacity for contentment’, and sets up a marvellous prelude to the story that follows.

This is Mary Cassatt herself (c1879-84, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian), painted by Edgar Degas. She described seeing Degas' work in 1874 as "a turning point in my life", and the two artists engaged in lively dialogues about the depiction of modern life and collected each other’s work. Here she may be in a photographer's studio, perhaps holding her artist's cartes de visite, and Degas "establishes her as his peer and as a successful artist in her own right".