PUBLISHING
Erica Wagner celebrates Persephone Books’ milestone
THIS MONTH, PERSEPHONE BOOKS TURNS 25 YEARS OLD. ITS volumes, with their distinctive soft-grey covers and colourful endpapers, have made this female-centric publisher and enticing bookshop a fixture of the literary landscape.
The project was the brainchild of Nicola Beauman, a biographer who, in 1983, published a survey of women’s literature, A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914-39. It struck her that the writers she was discussing – Marghanita Laski, Mollie Panter-Downes, Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth von Arnim – had been neglected for too long, and deserved greater recognition. And so, Persephone Books was born, with an aim to champion 20th-century female authors, reprinting overlooked fiction, non-fiction, poetry and more (there are a few male writers on the list, including Wilkie Collins, Duff Cooper and Leonard Woolf, but the focus is overwhelmingly feminine). Its first title was William – an Englishman by Cicely Hamilton, a novel written in 1918 that considers the effects of war on a young couple. Beauman describes it as ‘the finest book by a woman about World War I’.
‘I didn’t have a long-term vision,’ she says of launching Persephone, a name she chose because of its association with female creativity, and with the rejuvenation of spring. ‘I didn’t know, for instance, that Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day would be a bestseller.’ The 1938 novel by Winifred Watson – a social comedy about a governess set in London just before World War II – still tops the list of the company’s 10 most successful books; in 2008, it was made into a film starring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams. It was after this publication that Persephone’s office, and subsequently its shop, were established in Bloomsbury’s Lamb’s Conduit Street. Another popular work for the publisher is The Making of a Marchioness – a 1901 tale by Frances Hodgson Burnett, best known for her later books A Little Princess and The Secret Garden. Persephone’s titles focus on the seemingly small movements of quotidian life. ‘So-called “domestic” books are often feminist in a way that people fail to recognise,’ says Beauman. After all, depicting women’s lives as they are lived is in itself a feminist act.
