If there is one book these days that you can guarantee will be prominently displayed in the art department of every bookshop, good or otherwise, it is Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men, published in 2022. On a recent visit to Charleston in Lewes to see the exhibitions devoted to Walter Sickert and Gladys Hynes I consulted the index to Hessel’s book. I wasn’t unduly surprised that there was no entry for Gladys Hynes. After all, the book about Hynes and her connections, entitled Radical Lives, has only just been published by Yale. Katy Hessel may have been unaware of Gladys Hynes’ existence, although this didn’t stop Carolyn Trant writing about Hynes in her book Voyaging Out: British Women Artists from Suffrage to the Sixties, first published in 2019.

Other omissions are more curious and cannot be attributed to inadequate research. Nina Hamnett, a friend of Gladys Hynes, does not appear in Hessel’s index either. Five years ago Charleston put on a show of Hamnett’s work. A video was released to accompany the exhibition. It was narrated by Katy Hessel, with an excited enthusiasm that bordered on the deranged.

In Nina Hamnett’s rather breathless but hugely entertaining autobiography Laughing Torso (1932) she writes: ‘On February the fourteenth, 1890, I was born. Everybody was furious, especially my Father, who still is’. Katy Hessel comments ‘I think everyone was furious because she had been born a girl because in Victorian Britain being a girl was not desirable because you could not have the same advantages as your male counterparts.’ Instead of that tiresome commonplace, Nina Hamnett wrote: ‘As soon as I became conscious of anything I was furious too, at having been born a girl; I have since discovered that it has certain advantages’. On occasions she shows a striking lack of sorority: ‘I was then sent back to Tenby and to my grandmother, who was the most stupid and sentimental of women and loathed my father.’ Later she is dispatched to a ‘high-class Academy for young ladies at Westgate-on-Sea’. Of this she writes: ‘I shared a room with another girl. Apart from her beautiful red hair, which was curly and hung down to her waist, I decided that she was the same kind of gutless half-wit as the rest of her sex.’

Gladys Hynes is not mentioned in Laughing Torso, but Walter Sickert, the subject of the other Charleston show, certainly is – ‘the kindest and one of the most intelligent and charming men I ever met.’ At one point Nina Hamnett discovers that the room where she had lost her virginity was one of those where Rimbaud and Verlaine had stayed in London – the one in Howland Street, long demolished. She writes: ‘One day I said to Walter Sickert, “Do you think that they will put up a blue plaque on the house for me or will they put up one for Verlaine and Rimbaud?” and Walter said “My dear, they will put up one on the front for you and one on the back for them.”’