Women artists have always struggled to maintain an art practice as the primary focus of their lives. Going it alone, they’ve needed to contrive ways to survive, or accept that with commitment to a human “other” comes domestic concerns – and very likely, the demands of motherhood.

Some, such as the German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, have even died in the attempt. Having left her husband to pursue her career in Paris, on being persuaded to return to him, Modersohn-Becker became pregnant and died 20 days after giving birth to her first child: she was 31.

Review: Letters to Gwen John, Celia Paul (Vintage); Under The Bed, Stephanie Radok (Wakefield Press)

One woman who has quietly succeeded in living for and with her art over half a century, though not without considerable sacrifice, is the contemporary British artist, and now writer, Celia Paul.

Paul’s extraordinary, ascetic, art-focused life is offered up in two brilliant autobiographies, most recently Letters to Gwen John. John (who died in 1939, aged 63) was another British artist who did life tough in pursuit of her art – in her case, in belle epoque Paris.

Paul feels a particular connection to Gwen John, and in this book the series of letters she addresses to her act as a slow unravelling of the uncanny similarities between their lives and work. Both women had turbulent relationships with much older, more famous male artists – John with French sculptor Auguste Rodin, and Paul with renowned British painter Lucian Freud. Paul has a son, Frank Paul, with Freud, now aged 41.

For this reader, writing to someone who has been dead for decades felt at first too artificial, but Paul acknowledges this from the beginning: “I know you are dead, and that I’m alive, and that no usual communication is possible between us.” But then: “who knows […] whether there might not be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how.”

As Karl Ove Knausgaard has observed, there is a timelessness to Paul, which is beautifully expressed in her work. So if anyone could forge a communication channel into the past, it’s likely to be her.

After reading barely a chapter, I had accepted Paul’s premise, because by then I had fallen in love with her: her paint-stained smock and slippers, her flat without furniture or any creature comforts that might encourage visitors.

In all the years she has lived in London’s Great Russell Street opposite the British Museum (in the flat bought for her by Freud), no one, not even her husband, has been given a key. Her son largely grew up with Paul’s mother in Cambridge, with Paul visiting to spend time with him on weekends.

So austere is Paul’s flat that the writer Rachel Cusk, on first visiting her,

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