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Letter
The Persephone Biannually (the first,
after thirty-two Persephone Quarterlies)
has gone to the printer. Now we are getting ready
for the April mail-out; hoping for some reviews
of the two new books; enjoying a very funny piece
by Charlotte Smith in the Sunday Express
‘S’ magazine about How
To Run Your Home without Help (this will
be reprinted in the Biannually); and
looking forward to the Classic
Serial this Sunday April 1st and the
following Sunday April 8th (Easter Sunday). This
is an adaptation by Michelene Wandor of The
Making of a Marchioness and its sequel
The Methods of Lady Walderhurst (both of which
are included in our volume, Persephone Book No.29)
starring Lucy Briers, Joanna David, Miriam Margolyes
and Charles Dance. Do try and listen, it should
be fun.
We have had many replies to our second (monthly)
email letter in which we suggested books that
would make good presents for Easter for oneself
or one’s host, for example Kitchen
Essays and Gardener’s
Nightcap. If you are reading this but
are not on our email list do add yourself in by
going to the Persephone
Books home page and typing in your email
address in the box on the left-hand side.
So, along with everyone else, after the clocks
went forward we have been spring-cleaning, planting
in the window boxes outside the shop and longing
for the days when we can sit in the garden to
eat our lunch.
For now, it is too cold to do anything but walk
briskly round Bloomsbury. Jane Bell, who supplies
titles for our Vintage Books shelves, gave us
a book called Our Sisters’ London: Feminist
Walking Tours by Katherine Sturtevant. Here
are some of the highlights in the area round Lamb’s
Conduit Street: Start at Russell Square, where,
at No.56, Mary Russell Mitford (who wrote Our
Village, and bred Flush
and then gave him to Virginia
Woolf) once held a literary dinner party for
Wordsworth, among others; the Pankhurst family
lived at No.8 (now part of the Russell Hotel)
from 1888-93 and Christabel, Sylvia and Adela
used to play in the square; and Mary Datchett
in Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day worked
at the women’s suffrage office in Russell
Square.
Then walk through to Queen Square and look at
the beautiful building housing the Mary
Ward Centre; here you can learn French or
Italian, do a computer or a dance course, or have
a cheap vegetarian lunch. The Centre is named
after Mrs Humphrey Ward and was the Female School
of Design from 1861 until 1908, when it merged
with the Central School of Arts and Crafts. When
Fanny Burney lived in Queen Square from 1771-2,
the north end of the square was still on the edge
of open countryside and she could see the slopes
of Hampstead and Highgate. No. 29, now part of
the National Hospital, was the site of the Working
Women’s College, founded in 1864.
Now walk along Great Ormond Street and turn right
into Lamb’s Conduit Street. After coming
in to Persephone Books
at No.59, turn left into Rugby Street,
where Ted Hughes was lodging when he and Sylvia
Plath were first married, and walk through to
Great James Street where Dorothy Sayers lived
(there is a Blue
Plaque). Finally, turn left into Doughty Street
where Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby shared
a flat (another Blue Plaque).
This feminist walking tour of Bloomsbury will
be continued at a future date. For now, we hope
you all have a very good Easter break. I shall
be in New York and greatly look forward to seeing
eighty East Coast Persephone readers at the tea
on April 14th.
Nicola Beauman
30 March 2007
Lamb’s Conduit Street
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