Posy Simmonds review: Fifty years of skewering middle-class lives

Any social historian a century from now wanting to know English life of the late 20th and early 21st century would be well advised to dwell on the work of Posy Simmonds. She has a knack for skewering the detail of people’s lives — especially women’s lives, especially middle-class ones — in an absolutely recognisable way.

There’s a picture from her latest graphic novel, Cassandra Darke, showing a scene from a private view, and it’s like a mirror held up to what I imagine the launch of this show was like. Absolutely recognisable types, nailed like butterflies on a board. You can’t imagine a man with that social observation, not even Chris Riddell.

This little show commemorates Simmonds’s 50-year career. Her distinctive style took time to develop: her impressive first book cover for a novel by John Pollock is bold, subversive and unrecognisable from her present work.

What’s evident is that she was a feminist throughout but you don’t get much clue as to what made her so. From early on there’s a feisty sensibility which, combined with close scrutiny of recognisably middle-class frailties, made her Seventies Guardian series The Webers so successful.One of the most devastating illustrations here is of The Seven Ages of Women, with the brief period of nubile sexuality comically overcrowded, and every other ignored.

But where are the fabulous drawings for Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters? An unaccountable absence from this loving record.

Until Sep 15 (020 3696 2020, houseofillustration.org.uk)