Shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize 2022Longlisted for the William M B Berger Prize for British Art History 2022A boldly original work that tells the powerful stories of a group of extraordinary women as glimpsed through their still life paintings**Picked as an Art Book of the Year 2021 by the Guardian**'As seductive as it is scholarly ... Riveting' Financial Times'A wonderfully rich, deeply researched page-turner ... Sumptuous, precise and bewitching' Jennifer Higgie'Playful, provocative ... Her attentive, evocative prose renderings of paintings are pleasures in themselves' Times Literary Supplement------------------------------Lemons gleam in a bowl. Flowers fan out softly in a vase. A door swings open in a sparsely furnished room. What is contained in a still life - and what falls out of the frame?For women artists in the early twentieth century, including Ethel Sands, Nina Hamnett, Vanessa Bell and Gwen John, who lived in and around the Bloomsbury Group, the still life wa