The leaves outside the window of my writing room are a riot of colours, and as LM Montgomery wrote in Anne of Green Gables, ‘I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.’

‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ (Keats): this is the time of the harvest. It is also the time of the autumn sowing for the winter grains, whose plants will fill the fields come the spring. They do so, the Ancient Greeks believed, with the blessing of Persephone.

When I was a child, the story of Persephone in our Ancient Greek mythology book was one of my favourites. Damian, the hero of my new novel Aphrodite’s Tears, tells the tale:

‘Persephone was a beautiful maiden desired by Hades, god of the underworld. When she refused to be his wife he kidnapped her to live with him in his dark world of the dead. Demeter, Persephone’s mother and the goddess of harvest, was so distressed, she killed every plant on earth. To avoid the devastation of the world, Zeus commanded Hades to allow Persephone to return home. However, before letting her go, Hades tricked her into eating four pomegranate seeds, which ensured she had to live in the underworld for four months every year.

‘This was how the ancient Greeks explained the change of the seasons, the eternal cycle of death and rebirth in nature… While Demeter was mourning her daughter’s absence, she let the earth die, and that is why we have our winters.’

As a child, I loved the simple explanation for the seasons in this story. But I did not like the sadness with which autumn is imbued; the sense of loss – of injustice, even, that Persephone is forced to descend into the darkness. I’ve always found autumn a very beautiful season, especially once I came to live in England, where the colours of the turning leaves are just spectacular.

But rather than mourn at this time of year, people in Ancient Greek times celebrated. For the timing of the Persephone story differed back then. Followers of the Cult of Persephone believed that the autumn sowing was when Persephone ascended from the Underworld to reunite with her mother, Demeter.

For the Thesmophoria festival, women came together to carry out secret rituals to honour Persephone and celebrate both human and agricultural fertility. Away from the men – who were forbidden to attend – they fasted, they prayed and they made sacrifices to their goddesses.

In the city of Eleusis, the Eleusinian mysteries was a big festival that involved feasts (including pomegranate seeds), dancing in the fields and watching priests perform various rituals, including cutting an ear of corn in silence to represent new life.

I love the idea of celebrating autumn – ‘jolly Autumn’, as William Blake called it. For as Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in his ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’:

[T]here is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!