High Wages (1930) follows the career of Jane, a lowly assistant in a traditional draper's shop in a small town in Lancashire. She lives in and is poorly treated before leaving to open her own dress shop which, in contrast to Mr Chadwick's over-stuffed windows and haberdasher's drawers, is elegant, simple, and carefully stocked with ready-to-wear garments. We cannot praise this novel too highly for its remarkable mix of page-turning narrative and marvellous social insights and fashion details.

This week, Dorothy Whipple whose wonderful novels are also historical documents, with glimpses of the reality of contemporary women's working and domestic lives. If you want to know what it was like to work in a second-rate London beauty salon off Regent Street in the 1930s, read The Priory. Working for 'Miss Vanne' (in reality Mrs Porter who is supporting a son at Cambridge), Christine (salon name 'Sonia') with her new eyebrows, lipstick and hair-do, sits on a 'high stool in a white overall filling jars with face-cream' and watches the other Vannettes living a 'looking-glass life', then eats a 'cheap meal in a cheap restaurant' and stays in mean 'digs'. In just a couple of pages, Dorothy Whipple conjures up a whole world of lonely, faux London glamour. (Photo: Elizabeth Arden salon, 1928.) 

If we are very fortunate, we have lilac bushes from which we can pick armfuls to bring inside and fill a room with the lovely scent, as in 'Arranging the Lilac' (1906, private collection) by Albert Chevallier Tayler (1862-1925). If not, we can start from scratch and plant a lilac bush or two as investment for future arrangements. Robin Lane-Fox recommends the classic 'Firmament', 'Beauty of Moscow', 'Sensation', and 'Madame Lemoine'. 

When Mrs Dalloway buys the flowers herself for her party, she goes to Mulberry's the florists, where lilac is part of the "delicious scent, the exquisite coolness". "There were...delphiniums, sweet peas, bunches of lilac; and carnations...There were roses; there were irises...so she breathed in the earthy garden sweet smell...turning her head from side to side among the irises and roses and nodding tufts of lilac with her eyes half closed". These days it's rare to find lilac sold in shops, so we have to ''snuff in" the scent of lilac wherever we find it - in parks and in our own and other people's gardens. 'A Vase of Flowers' by Irene Hawkins includes lilac and is now, fittingly, in the Monk's House collection.

Lilacs are beloved in Russia where they grow wild and in great profusion, heralding the start of summer after a long, cold winter. They run through Russian literature, in the poems of Anna Akhmatova, the short stories of Chekhov, and the classic novels. In Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, Arkady returns to his father's country estate and enjoys the sight of ‘great bunches of lilacs’ picked to lie next to the samovar under an awning on the garden terrace. This is 'Lilac' (1915) by the Russian Impressionist Konstantin Korovin.

This week it's lilac, which is now at its peak. Proust describes lilac beautifully in A la recherche du temps perdu: "We would be met on our way by the scent of his [Swann's] lilac-trees...Out of the fresh little green hearts of their foliage the lilacs raised inquisitively over the fence of the park their plumes of white or mauve blossom...The nymphs of spring would have seemed coarse and vulgar in comparison with these young houris, who retained, in this French garden, the pure and vivid colouring of a Persian miniature." This is 'Proust's Lilacs', a wallpaper by Schumacher, which recalls botanical paintings by Redouté.

No-one has done more to revive the fortunes of the Potteries than Emma Bridgewater who was the first to have faith in and rejuvenate local pottery when she began production of her decorated creamware in 1985 (later to include our own 2013 100 books commemorative 'Pomegranate' jug). In 1995, the company purchased a former Victorian factory in Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent, and converted the site (above). Emma Bridgewater now employs around 230 people, and there's a cafe, pottery painting studio, shops, and factory tour.