RSS Biannually

Issue 05 - Spring/Summer 2009

Roman Fever
A Short Story by Edith Wharton
From the table at which they had been lunching two American ladies of ripe but well-cared-for middle age moved across the lofty terrace of the Roman restaurant and, leaning on its parapet, looked first at each other, and then down on the outspread glories of the Palatine and the Forum, with the same expression of vague but benevolent approval.

Issue 04 - Autumn/Winter 2008

'A Few Problems in the Day Case Unit' by Georgina Hammick
First published in the Critical Quarterly in autumn 1986 and reprinted in People for Lunch and other stories in 1987 and 1996

Issue 03 - Spring/Summer 2008

'What a Lovely Surprise' by Penelope Mortimer
Paul Lawrence came back from work early. Jill lost count of the pile of shirts she was checking and impatiently started again, cramming each shirt into the laundry basket and muttering: 'One ... two ... three ... four ...'

Issue 02 - Autumn/Winter 2007

The Gentle Art of Domesticity
'There is a world of difference between domesticity and domestication,' writes Jane Brocket in her book newly published by Hodder. It is, she explains, 'about the pleasures and joys of the gentle domestic arts of knitting, crochet, baking, stitching, quilting, gardening and homemaking' not about 'the repetitive, endless rounds of cleaning, washing, ironing, shopping and house maintenance that comes with domestication.'

Issue 02 - Autumn/Winter 2007

David Kynaston
Two Persephone writers have been crucial sources for the historian David Kynaston. Here he explains why.

Issue 01 - Spring/Summer 2007

Norah Hoult short story
It wasn't until October was well under way that she began to wonder that she had had no word from him. Even then she didn't actually worry. He had probably gone on some business trip.

Issue 32 - Winter 2006

'The Black Cap' by Katherine Mansfield
One of Katherine Mansfield's Experiments in Dialogue, first published in New Age May 17th 1917.

Issue 31 - Autumn 2006

Holiday Group
The Reverend Herbert Cliff-Hay's legacy had been paid at last. It seemed almost incredible, they had waited for it so long, talked about it so much, and alas! borrowed money upon it twice already. It reached them, indeed, in a terribly diminished form, what with death duties, and mysterious stamps, and fees of which they had had no previous cognisance.

Issue 30 - Summer 2006

'The Red Baize Door' by Ellen Ryder
As the train drew into Bath, Robert's face slid past the window like an enormously enlarged photo-graph in black and white, his eyes staring fixedly but without expression straight into Leda's. The shock made her cry, Forgive me, Robert; it was the meanness round your mouth I remembered - I had forgotten the fine shape of your head.

Issue 29 - Spring 2006

The Woman Novelist
Madeleine finished dressing by the open window, looking down onto the garden. It was not yet seven, but she knew that the day was going to be hot, cloudless and unchanging, because of the vivid, almost unnatural green of the trees on the far edge of the dew-damp lawn.

Issue 28 - Winter 2005

Good Evening, Mrs Craven
For years now they had been going to Porter's, in one of the little side streets off the Strand. They had their own particular table in the far corner of the upstairs room, cosily near the fire in winter, cooled in summer by a window at their backs, through which drifted soot and the remote bumble of traffic. Everything contemporary seemed remote at Porter's.

Issue 27 - Autumn 2005

'The Photograph' - a short story by Phyllis Bentley
'I shall say I'm twenty-nine,' said Miss Timperley recklessly. 'And I shall have my photograph specially taken.'

Issue 26 - Summer 2005

Is The Earth Finished?
RC Sherriff's 1939 novel The Hopkins Manuscript is a catastrophe novel about the moon crashing into the earth. It starts in February 1945 with a meeting of scientists who are among the first to learn the terrible fate awaiting the planet.

Issue 25 - Spring 2005

'Wednesday' - a short story by Dorothy Whipple
Mrs Bulford, as she still called herself, kept passing and re-passing the double wooden doors, standing wide open to make a gap in the garden wall. Every time she passed she glanced in at the house. She did no more than glance, but with every glance she saw a little more.

Issue 24 - Winter 2004

The Second Persephone Readers Weekend
'I found it pure pleasure from start to finish. The programme was excellent, as were all the speakers...'

Issue 24 - Winter 2004

Persephone and the OUP DNB
The new Oxford University Press Dictionary of National Biography was launched in 2004. It is available on line and of course the first thing we did was to see how many of our authors have entries.

Issue 23 - Autumn 2004

Room 226 by Hilda Bernstein
When I had become, not adjusted, but resigned to living for the time being in Johannesburg because I had married a South African and started to establish a family, I found myself, like other white South Africans and quite a number of non-whites too, employing a domestic servant.

Issue 22 - Summer 2004

The House At Hove
From the upstairs drawing-room of No. 18, the house which my mother took at the beginning of 1920, we could see the white cliffs on the edge of the town and, running towards them, the backs of the driving waves - for the wind was nearly always from the south-west.

Issue 21 - Spring 2004

The English Lesson
When Miss Maurer remembered she had to take IVa for English at three, there was no more pleasure in looking out of the staffroom window at the bare trees etched on a winter sky.

Issue 20 - Winter 2003

Votes for Women
We have had enough of forcible feeding. The willingness of the forcible feeders to give as much pain and to do as much mischief as may be necessary to save them from having to give in may be natural; but it is in no way the less discreditable for that.

Issue 20 - Winter 2003

Charlotte Graves-Taylor talks about Tea with Mr Rochester
Some thirty years ago, in a second-hand bookshop in Bath, I found a 1952 Penguin entitled Tea with Mr Rochester. The title attracted me because, like Prissy in the eponymous story, the first man in my life had been Mr Rochester: I read it with a sense of coming home.

Issue 20 - Winter 2003

Weekend at Newnham
It was under a clear and sunny September sky that one hundred Persephone readers gathered in Cambridge, to walk the same corridors and share the same rooms as Amy Levy and Sylvia Plath and eat in the dining hall where, in 1928, Virginia Woolf gave one of the lectures that became A Room of One's Own: the first Persephone Conference was held to commemorate this event.

Issue 19 - Autumn 2003

Blanche Ridge reflects on Saplings by Noel Streatfeild
I have thoroughly enjoyed all the Persephone novels and have learned now that when I pick one up and open it I will love reading it and be made to think as well. But I have enjoyed none as much as I enjoyed my first reading of Saplings.

Issue 15 - Autumn 2002

Winifred Watson 1906 - 2002
Winifred Watson, the author of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, died on 5 August 2002 aged 95.

Issue 13 - Spring 2002

'What's wrong with new novels' by BR Myers
Robert McCrum in the Observer called this 'an entertaining and passionate lament for what Myers sees as the parlous state of contemporary American literary writing'.

Issue 13 - Spring 2002

Pandora's Handbag
'We have been warned regularly, for almost a century now, that the Death of the Novel is nigh. This dire prediction has always been confounded but now, for the first time, something seems different. .'

Issue 11 - Autumn 2001

How we choose our books
Persephone Books arose out of thirty years of being at home with small children: so much time to to rediscover twentieth century women writers; and to buy books for 20p, or go to the London Library and come home with an armful of forgotten books.

Issue 11 - Autumn 2001

Persephone in Bloomsbury
'...Pevsner wrote that this is a 'lively local shopping street, a rarity now in inner London'; we have a newsagent, doctor, dentist, greengrocer, the funeral parlour that 'did' Nelson in 1805...'

Issue 10 - Summer 2001

Reading Groups by Jenny Hartley
Jenny Hartley, who wrote the Persephone Preface to Few Eggs and No Oranges, has written Reading Groups (OUP �5.99). In order to assemble the material for the book she and her colleague Sarah Turvey sent questionnaires to 350 groups. Here are some of their responses, prefaced by Jenny Hartley's comments:

Issue 10 - Summer 2001

'Gender Differences in Fiction' by Ferdinand Mount, Editor of the Times Literary Supplement
'...The truth is that the modern novels I read with real, deep pleasure are almost all written by women.'

Issue 9 - Spring 2001

Open Book: Book of the Year
At the end of the year Charlie Lee-Potter of Radio 4 chose, as one of her two books of the year, Elizabeth Berridge's Tell it to a Stranger.

Issue 7 - Autumn 2000

Women and the Great War
As Ruth Adams shows in A Woman's Place, the First World War irrevocably changed women's lives, partly because of the opportunity it gave them for paid work...

Issue 7 - Autumn 2000

Margaret Forster and Marjory
Oriel Malet, author of Marjory Fleming, met the novelist and biographer Margaret Forster when the latter was writing her biography of Daphne du Maurier, one of Oriel's closest friends.

Issue 6 - Summer 2000

Saplings by Noel Streatfeild
Extract from the Persephone Preface by the psychiatrist Dr Jeremy Holmes.

Issue 6 - Summer 2000

Elizabeth Bowen in 1946
Her review of Marjory Fleming by Oriel Malet appeared in the Tatler on 12 June.

Issue 5 - March 2000

Persephone Books Nos 1 - 12
We of course hope that readers of the Persephone Quarterly have read all our books! But for those who have not...

Issue 4 - December 1999

'Women Engraving Wood' by Pat Jaff�
Pat Jaff�, the author of Women Engravers (1990), wrote this article especially for The Persephone Quarterly.

Issue 2 - June 1999

'The Victorian Chaise-longue' by Penelope Lively
Novelist Penelope Lively recalls what first intrigued her about Marghanita Laski's novel and explains why she thinks it is still such a powerful book nearly fifty years later.

Issue 1 - March 1999

'Sexual Reading' by Nicci Gerard
This article by Nicci Gerrard (one half of Nicci French), first published in The Observer on 27 September 1998, explores the differences between the books read by men and by women.