Venus, Vanishing, Rebecca Birrell’s debut novel, opens with a letter written in the twilight years of the Weimar Republic: ‘Mother, I write to you from another life.’ The author of the note, Hannah Sherman, is a seamstress and aspiring painter who has fled her family home in Berlin to avoid marrying a man she does not love. Using the surname Schmidt, she rents a room with two women and washes and mends others’ clothes to pay her rent. She begins to draw and paint more seriously, frequenting galleries and nightclubs to learn and observe, and embarks on relationships with Saul, a curator, and Charlotte, a dancer. Like her, they are Jewish and outsiders. Together they form a talented and rebellious bohemian trio.

Birrell, a curator and art historian, carefully paints a decade in Hannah’s life, following her from Germany to Paris and eventually to England. As well as a story of queer desire and artistic coming of age, Venus, Vanishing portrays a creative existence crushed by history. Through her job as a seamstress, Hannah meets the wealthy and inscrutable Elke Grese, the wife of a politician in the Reich Chamber of Culture, who commissions nude portraits for herself and her friends. An affair follows, and patronage, with the requirement that Hannah yield all her paintings to Elke. They are altered by another hand, the subject matter crudely Aryanised and exhibited under the name Answald Dietrich as idealised nationalist propaganda. 

Hannah enters Elke’s world of boiled potatoes, wedges of pink meat and golden-haired maids with an eye to its spoils: enough money to live and create. She reflects on the representative power of the image, realising that her work has been compromised: ‘My life was like a diptych, painted scenes