For the authors of Gladys Hynes: Radical Lives, ‘the process of recovery remains long and hard’. So many of Hynes’s paintings have been lost. Only a handful of her woodcarvings survive. Many records documenting her life and art have been destroyed; she appears instead as a glimpse in other people’s histories. Women often do. As Hynes once wrote to her friend Ezra Pound, ‘your sex has had too much of the doing and saying.’ This book, a careful blend of biography and art-historical study, ‘seeks to restore some of her own rightful light’.

The project to reassert Hynes’s place in modernist art history – any attempt to recover a marginalised figure, in fact – faces problems other than missing evidence. How to balance the work and the life? Is it sensible to write a figure back into the very history from which she has been excluded? Perhaps it would be impossible to separate Hynes from the restless passages of the modern era, so many of which shaped her. Born in 1888 in India, she was part of a British colonial elite at the height of the Empire. Back in London, she saw in the 20th century at the funeral procession of Queen Victoria in 1901.

Hynes benefitted from the expansion of education for women, attending art school in Ealing and the London School of Art in Kensington, and then in Cornwall. There she was part of one turn in British art, from realism to modernism, among the Newlyn School of painters. As a working artist,