Letter

The excitement this week was going to see the film of Atonement and glimpsing a Persephone book in one of the very last frames: when the heroine, Briony Tallis, now elderly, is being interviewed about her book that is an ‘atonement’ for what she did sixty years before, the interviewer is holding the book and it is in the format of a Persephone book.

We knew that they were going to use one (a meticulous mock-up in fact) and are thrilled that it made it through to the final cut. But blink and you miss it – you have to look at the interviewer on the left of the screen rather than at Vanessa Redgrave’s amazing face (and you won’t want to miss a moment of her astonishing performance). However, nothing has changed my view that novels like Atonement, successful though they have been, do not have the authenticity of ‘our’ books such as Jocelyn Playfair’s A House in the Country; Ian McEwen did his research magnificently (and one of the books he acknowledged using, Lucilla Andrew’s No Time for Romance has now been reprinted) but Jocelyn Playfair knew exactly how it was at the time because she was there, at the time.

Here in the shop we have been basking in the September sunshine, with the door wide open to the street all day long and everyone greatly enjoying the brightness and light after so many grey summer days.  Last week was quiet, which was useful in some ways as we are now in the very last stages of getting the first three Classics ready for the printer and almost all the crucial decisions have been made ahead of next April’s launch date.

We have also been sending out review copies of our Winter books – The Young Pretenders, an 1895 children’s novel by Edith Henrietta Fowler; The Closed Door and Other Stories by Dorothy Whipple; and On the Other Side: Letters to my Children from Germany 1940-46 by Mathilde Wolff-Monckeberg. These will be published on October 25th, although they will be available to Persephone readers a couple of weeks before that.

Last week’s Book Group was about Marjory Fleming and was led by Anne Harvey, who has appeared on radio programmes about Marjory;  there was an excellent discussion about Marjory and Doreen, one of our other books about a young child. (I unfortunately could not be there because I was at the launch for the biography by Anne Sebba of Jennie Churchill).  Next month’s Book Group, on October 3rd, is about Every Eye; we are delighted that Isobel English’s daughter Victoria Orr-Ewing will be present.

And here are links to three articles I have very much enjoyed reading: the first is an article from the New York Times about the Knopf archive at Texas and in particular the readers’ reports. It begins, unbelievably, with the 1950 reader who thought Anne Frank’s diary dull and that no one would be interested in it (an opinion shared by fifteen other publishers before Doubleday picked it up in 1952). The diary became  one of the best-selling books in history, with 30 million copies sold so far. Which just goes to show … something.

Then there is an article in The New Yorker about ‘the biography business’ as seen by the biographer Meryle Secrest. Since I have just finished writing a biography of the novelist Elizabeth Taylor, I found this particularly interesting. And there was this article in the Boston Globe about that great critic James Wood, who is moving from The New Republic to The New Yorker. One of my constant gripes is that we do not have anything in the UK like  either of these magazines, or like The Atlantic Monthly; but at least we can now read them on line.

Nicola Beauman
15 September 2007
Lamb’s Conduit Street