Maryam’s Diener’s latest novel BEYOND BLACK THERE IS NO COLOUR is published on 27 February. With the rise of mainstream feminist-oriented publishing and the debate around fourth-wave feminism being very much in the zeitgeist, the time is right to (re)introduce the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad to British readers.

In the News

BEYOND BLACK THERE IS NO COLOUR will be included in Edmund de Waal’s “Library of Exile” opening at the British Museum on 11 March

The New York City Ballet’s new ballet, VOICES, which recently premiered at the David H. Koch Theater, features “Ms. Phelan, dancing to the voice of the Iranian poet and film director Forough Farrokhzad, is pulled in one direction and then the other as her willowy arms come to life in ways that her legs are used to doing.”

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Last night Quartet Books launched Beyond Black There Is No Colour, Maryam Diener’s wonderful exploration of the life of legendary Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad. At Thomas Heneage’s renowned bookshop, Chairman of Quartet Naim Attallah paid tribute to Maryam with the following speech:

Quartet are about to publish a third book written by an enchanting Iranian author who I have had the privilege to know since 2008 when I published her first novel, Without Saying Goodbye. Then she was Maryam Sachs, living as an exile between London, Paris and New York but dreaming of Tehran. A bitter-sweet tale of love and loss, it achieved some fine reviews but never received the exposure it deserved. Her second novel, The Passenger, was published in 2013 to receive the same fate – a few excellent reviews and what literary publishers term ‘respectable’ sales. Both books had much in common. An elegant, sophisticated prose sparsely spread over just a dozen pages more than 100 but with the acid clarity of Nabokov.

Maryam’s wanderings gave her time in Berlin where she helped create Éditions Moon Rainbow, a publishing house which specialised in limited edition art books presenting polylogues between poetry and the visual arts, including those with Marcel Broodthaers, Francesco Clemente and Bei Dao, Henri Michaux and Rosemarie Trockel, Christopher Le Brun and English poets, Enzo Cucchi and Italian poets, Jean Fautrier and Francis Ponge, Eugénie Paultre and Etel Adnan.

Now Maryam Diener, I’m thrilled to be publishing her imaginative fiction, Beyond Black There Is No Colour, inspired by the life of the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad. Perhaps this book will break through the critical recognition and sales barrier. It tells the tale of one of the most iconic dissenting voices in modern Iranian history. Often referred to as Iran’s Sylvia Plath – for her highly original, confessional writing style as much as her battle with depression and tragic death – she went against the grain by challenging widely held conventions in a turbulent mid-century Iran.

Maryam Diener’s beautiful homage to a poet little known outside her much-troubled country will hopefully be given the reception it deserves.

Only the Dead: A Levantine Tragedy by T. J. Gorton

PB • 216x138mm (with flaps) • £12 • Fiction (F) • 9780704374607 • £14 • Quartet Books

Only the Dead: A Levantine Tragedy is also, by chance, the creation of an American with long experience of the language, life and literature of the Middle East.

Ted Gorton has created a fictional memoir of a Lebanese entrepreneur who looks back over the stirring events of the past decades from the shelter of his poetry library in a villa overlooking bombed-out Beirut.

What makes it exceptional is the fusion of portraits of real people with impeccably researched historical detail.

I found myself immersed in a fast-paced narrative packed full of adventures on the battlefield and in the bedroom and spliced with espionage, revenge, betrayal and war—and I could not put it down.

Barnaby Rogerson

Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood

Jan Marsh                                                                                                  Quartet £18.95 

Rating: 

The working-class women who modelled for, and even married, members of the Pre-Raphaelite artistic circle were usually portrayed as little more than groupies. With their luscious curly hair, bee-stung lips and Insta-brows, beauties such as Jane Morris, Lizzie Siddal and Fanny Cornforth may take up a lot of canvas, but they don’t get much credit for being equal partners in the making of some of the most revolutionary art of the Victorian era.

Instead these ‘stunners’, as they were condescendingly known, are consigned to the role of ‘muse’, a passive creature whose job it was to sit and suffer and stir up their Great Men to new levels of creative expression. No wonder so many of them came to a sticky end: Siddal committed suicide, Morris endured years of depression and Cornforth finished her days in a lunatic asylum.

But to write these women off as victims would be a huge mistake, argues pioneering art historian Jan Marsh in this seminal work, which has been reissued to coincide with a major exhibition on now at the National Portrait Gallery (until January 26).

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Jan Marsh’s seminal work has been reissued marking the National Portrait Gallery’s show dedicated to the female Pre-Raphaelites. Above: The Bower Meadow by DG Rossetti

Instead, using the latest biographical research to update her classic study of the women who lived alongside the Pre-Raphaelite Brothers, Marsh shows that many of these ‘sisters’ had significant artistic skills themselves, not to mention a fair degree of ambition. Siddal, who had a long, unhappy relationship with D G Rossetti before killing herself as a result of his infidelity, was a fine artist in her own right.

Morris, meanwhile, was more than just an exquisite face. While her dramatic looks provided constant inspiration both to her husband William Morris and to her lover Rossetti, her skill as an artistic needlewoman went a long way towards fixing in the general public’s imagination the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic: medieval tapestry motifs reimagined for the industrial age.

Not all the ‘sisters’ found such satisfaction. Georgiana Burne-Jones, a middle-class minister’s daughter who married Edward Burne-Jones, admitted that she had ‘fallen behind’ her husband when it came to artistic achievement because it didn’t seem worth investing in her ‘tolerable skill’ when she was surrounded by such stand-out genius. Today, we would wonder whether she was limiting herself because she was worried about outshining her husband.

Marsh is too scrupulous a scholar to pretend that every woman who crossed paths with the Pre-Raphaelites was a genius oppressed by the patriarchy. On the other hand, she has found some extraordinary stories about the ways in which these women contributed to what was still a family business – ordering paints, making costumes, sending out invoices, fixing lunch for everyone in the studio. This is popular art history at its best.

Kathryn Hughes

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During the 1990s one of my secretary’s, Lucy Wastnage, came with me from Namara House as I moved into my new Asprey offices above Garrard in Regent Street… continue

The Enigma of Leni Riefenstahl

This week’s review in the Times Literary Supplement of A Scribbler in Soho reminded me of the time Bron Waugh approached Hugh Trevor Roper to try to persuade him to do a review of my fourth collection of interviews, More of a Certain Age, for the Literary Review. To continue press here…. 

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‘This show about the women behind the bearded brotherhood turns up a neglected talent amid all those fuzzy muses’

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The magnificent reviews for the new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Pre-Raphaelite Sisters, which opens on 17 October and runs until January 26, have been very exciting to read…  Read the full blog post here