Letter

The sad news has arrived of the death of Julia Briggs two weeks ago. She was a brilliant academic, teacher and writer. She was a good friend to Persephone, gave a wonderful lecture on Virginia Woolf at one of the Persephone conferences at Newnham – cf her book Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life – and wrote the excellent Preface to There Were No Windows by Norah Hoult, Persephone Book No. 59.

But above all Julia was kind, generous, funny and beloved by all who knew her. William St Clair’s obituary of her was published in the Independent; and here is the Guardian obituary by Alison Light (whose Mrs Woolf and the Servants has just been widely and appreciatively reviewed, for example in the Observer). I admired and loved Julia and know that it will be at Christmas that I will miss her most (which is ironic, because we were both Jewish): after she came to live in the (newly spruced-up) Brunswick Centre nearby she would always come in to the shop on Christmas Eve, to buy books and make me laugh and talk about literature, in particular about the kind of literature that interested both of us most. Virtually her last words to me, on the day I visited her a month ago, were to respond to my almost callously carefree remark that we were off to the Lake District, to the Dudden Valley, by reminding me that Wordsworth wrote about the Dudden. So when I arrived there, thinking all the time of poor dear Julia lying in her hospital bed, I immediately found Sonnets from The River Duddon (she would have approved of the bookishness of the house we were staying in). These lines from ‘Afterthought’ will now always make me think of her:

‘Still glides the Stream, and shall for ever glide;/The Form remains, the Function never dies.’

I have just come back from a few days at Coombe in Cornwall, from one of the Landmark Trust cottages there. Luckily we had a good deal of sunshine (overseas readers will know that the UK has had the wettest summer since 1956) and have come back ready to face la rentrée. We have now been without Emily for two weeks and enormously miss her get-up-and-go, her charm and her warmth of personality. But Alarys, Sarah, Celia, Francesca and I, helped as always by Lisa on Saturdays and by various visiting stalwarts such as Judith, Tudy, Emma and Ali, are learning to manage without her...

People often ask where they can buy the posters that we have in the shop (apart from ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ which we sell for £7.50 or you can buy directly from Barter Books ). Well, there is a sale at Christie’s in two weeks, all the posters are clearly visible on the website and you can leave a bid on line! They are not cheap any more but still, in my view, good value, since one poster like this of Yorkshire lights up any room. And if you miss the sale you can always buy posters from Paul and Karen Rennie or from Leslie Sherlock.

Finally, I went down to Swansea the other day and on the way back bought Harriet Evans’s A Hopeless Romantic at the station bookstall. Never has a journey gone so fast!  I simply loved this book, a modern variation on the theme of The Making of a Marchioness. And imagine my delight when, on p336, the heroine and her grandmother sit outside ‘a pretty little pub in Lamb’s Conduit Street’ and, after they have talked about Nick (the marquess) we find: ‘”Let me say something,” said Mary.  “Just one more thing, and then I shall stop, and we’ll finish our drinks and go into Persephone Books and buy something nice to read.” “Yes,” said Laura.’ And, we presume, they do.

Nicola Beauman
30 August 2007
Lamb's Conduit Street