Letter

In the last two weeks Emily and I have been to Kent and to Yorkshire.  In Kent fifty Persephone readers came to Great Maytham Hall near Rolvenden, the setting for The Making of a Marchioness, The Shuttle and The Secret Garden. We had tea and Tom’s lemon cakes, Anne Sebba gave a wonderful talk about Frances Hodgson Burnett, and we explored the beautiful gardens and in particular the secret garden.  The house in which Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote The Shuttle was demolished and replaced by the existing one, designed by Lutyens, but the estate at Maytham ‘first took shape in the early Saxon times’ – and the Saxon background is an important part of the book.

Two days later, just before the appalling floods, we went up to Yorkshire, and here we enjoyed a cream tea at Helmsley Walled Garden. I gave a short talk about Persephone Books and then we walked round another magnificent garden. That evening Emily and I stayed with Miranda Parrott, who lives in a beautiful house on the edge of the moors near Pickering and who organised the event for us.

The next day I went to Sheffield to give a paper about Dorothy Whipple at a conference on the ‘Middlebrow’.  Here ‘delegates from as far afield as Antwerp, Ohio and Melbourne will discuss such once-popular authors as Winifred Holtby, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Elizabeth Von Arnim and Dorothy Whipple’ as Steve McClarence wrote in The Times on the morning of the conference. It was a splendid and subversive occasion (subversive because the kind of authors talked about are not part of the canon in university English departments) and I enjoyed hearing talks about comedy, parody, Time and Tide and psychoanalysis, as well as the authors mentioned above.  I was particularly pleased to hear Pam Hirsch talk about the 1940 film of Phyllis Bottome's The Mortal Storm: we are reprinting this in the near future and I had not realised that 'it was made into a MGM movie as part of a cycle of anti-Nazi feature films produced between 1939 and 1941'. I am already imagining a Persephone film showing at the British Film Institute; and was able to tell Pam Hirsch, who is writing Phyllis Bottome's biography, that she lived for many years in the house now lived in by Deborah Moggach – there is, after all, an intriguing synergy about the two not-dissimilar novelists living in the same eighteenth-century cottage on the edge of Hampstead Heath.

Otherwise this week: we were delighted that, in an article in this month’s Literary Review about books and design Jeremy Lewis wrote: ‘Penguins were collected from the earliest days, as were the green-covered Viragos and, more recently, Nicola Beauman’s grey-coated Persephone Books, the elegance and austerity of which are reminiscent of early Penguins.’
 
And this piece appeared in the Guardian about Kudos having filmed Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, ‘a 1930s novel which was out of print for half a century before it was rediscovered’ (by Persephone Books for heaven’s sake, as several of you loyally wrote to us).
   
Do try and go to the exhibition at Tate Britain called ‘How We Are: photographing Britain’. Here is the picture used on the poster – this could be one of the young women in The Village, except she is obviously not a country girl.

Roger Mayne Girl Jiving in Southam Street 1957 V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum. Photo: © Roger Mayne

Finally – Francesca had a baby girl on June 15th, the day she wrote the last Fortnightly Letter, in fact a few hours afterwards, and the same weekend that the series her husband directed, The Flight of the Conchords, aired in the US to amazing reviews.  All is well, and since the whole family will be in London for the summer, mother and baby will, we hope, sometimes be seen in the shop.