Rebecca Birrell is a Research Affiliate at The Fitzwilliam Museum and a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of St Andrews. Her first book, This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century was awarded an Antonia Frazer Award for a Biography in Progress by the Society of Authors, and was chosen as a Guardian/Observer Art Book of the Year. Venus, Vanishing is her first novel.