Letter

When Persephone Books began publishing in 1998 there were two things I particularly wanted to do, but I reluctantly thought better of both of them: one was to print our books with uncut pages, as the French do, and to supply a paper-knife so that Persephone readers would have the joy of cutting the pages of their novels (like Anna in Anna Karenina).

The other was to print out books in separate thirty-two page sections and send them out as serials: I thought this would be excellent for busy women going to work on the Tube or with a snatched hour before they had to fetch children from school.  Alas, neither ideas were thought viable, but the latter is now possible at www.mouseholdwords.com: you register and are sent a chunk of the novel when you choose - once a week or once a month.

So I have just begun to read Little Dorrit as a serial, following in the footsteps of Jenny Hartley (author of the Reading Groups book) who read a chapter a month with a group of friends and enjoyed it enormously. Jenny also wrote the Preface to Few Eggs and No Oranges, Persephone Book No. 9, which is one of our bestsellers - it has sold 6000 copies - and has written two excellent books about Second World War literature by women. And she has just finished writing a book about Dickens and the women of Urania Cottage, which was set up in 1846 and used as an experiment by Dickens to reform fallen women. The home taught the girls how to cook, sew, clean and read and write before sending them to Australia to start a new life; one of them was the model for Little Dorrit.

Last December I heard a very good play by Simon Gray on Radio 4: called Little Nell, it was inspired by Claire Tomalin's The Invisible Woman and was about Nellie Ternan, her relationship with Dickens and the lies she had to tell for the rest of her life after he died.  A stage version of the play, also called Little Nell, has just finished a run in Bath; with any luck it will be shown elsewhere this autumn.

I went to two book-launches this week. One was for Sue Gee's Reading in Bed, a remarkable book about two women of a certain age called Dido and Georgia who, when we first meet them, are returning to their ordinary lives from a week away at a literary festival; but the uncomplicated dailiness of their lives is far more complex and difficult, and interesting, than at first appears, and I read breathlessly through to see what would happen to them. There is also an elderly woman called Maud who, in her derangement, reminded me far too much of poor Claire Temple in There Were No Windows, our own novel about a woman with incipient dementia. The other launch was for Marie Phillips's Gods Behaving Badly; it is one of the books going with me to the Lake District this week.

This incredible picture (below), Cecile Walton's 'A Romance' (1920) was reproduced in the Financial Times this weekend, in a review of an exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

I was mesmerised by it.  On the one hand it reminds me of Enid Bagnold's 1938 book The Squire (one of the very few novels about a woman having a baby rather than conceiving, being pregnant or looking after it, since it focuses exclusively on the days just before and just after the birth); on the other hand it is full of oddities - the woman is apparently being washed after having given birth, and her elder son is watching her; but the baby is not newborn, and the woman's near-nakedness is startling.  The FT writes: 'The catalogue entry [about 'A Romance'] sells the work short by suggesting blandly that the painting is about "searching for personal identity".  It dismisses the responses of Cecile Walton's contemporaries, who pointed to parallels in Old Master art.  But these parallels cannot be dismissed, since the painting is nothing if not a sophisticated riff on nativities, not so much those of Christ in his stable but of the more domestic birth of the Virgin Mary.’

Finally, do buy Country Life this week – there is a delightful little piece about us headed ‘A goldmine for discerning readers’ and a picture of the shop. This was taken before I planted the white geraniums which can be seen flourishing on this charming blog by 'Kimbofo'; it’s always fun when people come into the shop and then go home and post about us, and since the Royal Mail‘s free marketing magazine has just informed me there are now an incredible 70 million blogs worldwide and 1.5 million posts a day – well, it’s even more amazing that 'Kimbofo' found us, wrote about us  – and that I then discovered what she had written and can thank her via this Fortnightly Letter!

Nicola Beauman
30 July 2007
Lamb’s Conduit Street