Letter

The excitement of the last week has been the jackets, pinnies, aprons and dressing-gowns arriving from India. We are about to unpack and iron them, finalise the price, hang them up and post photographs here. We will be able to send all the items by post, except for the jackets which we feel have to be tried on in the shop.

Otherwise we have been enjoying the January calm. The March books (Princes in the Land by Joanna Cannan and The Woman Novelist and Other Stories by Diana Gardner) have gone to the printer and the next task is to organise four reprints: William – an Englishman, Mariana, The Victorian Chaise-longue and Family Roundabout (we do them in batches of four to save money).

The batch of reprints after these will include An Interrupted Life and Fidelity. The latter, together with Brook Evans, has been having a small boost in sales since the establishment of the website of the Susan Glaspell Society (http://academic.shu.edu/glaspell/index.html), the purpose of which is ‘the re-establishment of Susan Glaspell as a major American dramatist and fiction writer through the ongoing production of high-quality scholarship, critical analysis of all her works, performances of her plays, and reprinting of her stories and novels.’ We allow ourselves a little glow of pride about this. When we first reprinted Fidelity in 1999 even the American literary establishment considered Susan Glaspell uninteresting; and although she is not yet up there with Edith Wharton and Willa Cather, which is where, in our opinion, she should be, her name is at last becoming better known. (Indeed, if there is a British academic who wants to write about her, the deadline has only just passed for the call for papers to be presented at the Susan Glaspell Roundtable at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference in Philadelphia in November.)

Last week Albion Magazine Online published a very interesting article about us by Isabel Taylor. It can be found at www.zyworld.com/albionmagazineonline. Another fascinating article appeared in the Guardian at www.guardian.co.uk. It is by Sarah Waters and is about the research for her latest novel, set in the 1940s, during which ‘I read evocative novels of wartime life by Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Evelyn Waugh. I found less fashionable novels, too. Nevil Shute's Requiem for a Wren is a muted, compelling account of post-war guilt and displacement, based around the suicide of its enigmatic heroine. Noel Streatfeild's unsettling Saplings describes the breakdown of middle-class family life. Henry Green's Caught, inspired by his experiences of fire-fighting during the Blitz, captures the oddness as well as the vividness of many dramatic wartime incidents.’ Also ‘the diaries really came alive for me, as their writers and my characters began to share dates, a set of priorities, a physical landscape… "Noisy air-raid last Thursday and Friday," recorded Vere Hodgson in Notting Hill, of February 3 and 4. "Had a good view of the star flares. Most were gold - some blue - like glorious fireworks."’ We very much like the way Noel Streatfield is bracketed with Nevil Shute and Henry Greene, both of whom, although very different, are deeply underrated; and the way Vere Hodgson is mentioned, without the title of her book, Few Eggs and No Oranges, rather as if her diary is now such a classic that Sarah Waters assumes Guardian readers know who she is.

Finally, if anyone in the UK is longing for a mid-winter holiday we recommend www.vivat.org.uk. A last minute weekend at one of their twelve properties is reduced in price. And since we give Vivat a selection of our books what could be nicer than going to one of their beautiful houses and spending the weekend reading Persephone books?

Nicola Beauman
30 January 2006
Lamb's Conduit Street