Nicola Beauman, photo by Martin Godwin
Nicola Beauman née Mann was born in 1944 and brought up in London. After reading English at Cambridge she married Nicholas Lacey, the architect, worked in New York as a journalist and in an art gallery, and in London in publishing and as a fiction reviewer; her five children were born between 1968 and 1985. In 1976 she married the economist Christopher Beauman. A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914-39, her first book, was published by Virago in 1983 (reprinted 1989 and 1995); it was reissued in 2008, twenty-five years after first publication, as a Persephone book. Cynthia Asquith appeared in 1987, Morgan: a biography of EM Forster in 1993, and The Other Elizabeth Taylor was published in April 2009 as A Persephone Life. Nicola Beauman founded Persephone Books in 1998. It was set up to reprint (mostly) women writers, (mostly) of the inter-war period portrayed in a A Very Great Profession, and now has ninety-six titles in print.
