| Letter
The last two weeks have been dominated by the
post strike, by the rush to get the Biannually and
the Catalogue to the printer (why does
one always leave everything to the last minute?)
and by a day at the Frankfurt Book Fair to meet
the German publisher translating The
Far Cry, the French one translating Cheerful
Weather for the Wedding – and
a Spanish one whom I hope will be translating
something…
But we also had a Persephone event at the British
Film Institute which was hugely enjoyable – a
showing of the extraordinary Went
the Day Well? and Diary
for Timothy. Many of us had never seen
either, and most had never seen the latter, and
we were all inspired to try and see some more
of Humphrey
Jennings - here is a link to Mike
Leigh talking about him.
Then, last Tuesday, Persephone sponsored an
excellent PEN event
about women war reporters at the Guardian
Newsroom. Nicholas Murray wrote about it
here: bibliophilicblogger.blogspot.com.
Also last week I watched a dvd of Letter
from an Unknown Woman (1948) directed
by Max Ophuls who made The Reckless Moment (the
film based on The
Blank Wall, Persephone Book No.
42). Letter is an extraordinary
film, not only because of the camera work
but because of the character of the heroine,
Lisa, who dedicates her life to her love
for the philandering concert pianist Stefan.
Some see this film as a romantic one about
unrequited love. But its deeper theme is
obsession, almost masochistic obsession.
John Fowles wrote about the 1922 Stefan Zweig
short story upon which the film was based: ‘An
intelligent modern woman may well find the
heroine’s endless self-denial hideously
improbable.’ We do, which is why Lisa
reminded me of Rosamond Lehmann’s heroines:
Olivia in The
Weather in the Streets is in love
in a very similar way to Lisa in the short
story and in the film. (I always feel that
Rosamond Lehmann’s novels, superbly
written and readable as they are, should
come with a health warning for young women:
they can make them think that love has to
have this element of obsession and self-denial.
Well, maybe they did once, thankfully no
longer.)
And yesterday we went to the Woodstock
Celebrates Books literary festival,
where fifty people came to a showing of They
Were Sisters. Now we have one more week
before the three new books are published: to
do the new shop windows; send the database off
to the printer for him to send the Biannually and
the Catalogue to our ten thousand readers;
and so on and so forth, all ready for the busiest
six weeks of the year, the end of October until
the middle of December.
Two dates for your diary – we are at a
Charity Fair in aid of Maggie’s
Centres at Kensington Town Hall on November
1st from 11 am to 9 pm; and we are at the Country
Living Fair at the Business Design Centre
in Islington from November 14th-18th. It would
be great to see you at either event. Apart from
this, there will be several late openings at
the shop – full details in the next Biannually,
which you should receive in ten days in the UK,
a bit longer elsewhere.
Nicola Beauman
Lamb’s Conduit Street
15 October 2007 |
