Letter

   July is being a very theatrical month for us at Persephone Books. First The Chalk Garden (cf. the 15th June 2008 letter) which is most strongly recommended – the performances are sold out but there are ten seats every day that you can queue for; then, next week, it’s the new play by Amy Rosenthal (who worked at Persephone Books for a while!) which is about DH Lawrence and Frieda, and John Middleton Murry and Katharine Mansfield on holiday in Cornwall.  The play, which is on at the Hampstead Theatre, is called On the Rocks and you can read a few of the (excellent) reviews here. Sarah Hemming began her review in the Financial Times:‘This is the time of year when couples who have arranged to go on holiday together suddenly have a moment’s doubt about the wisdom of the enterprise. A trip to Amy Rosenthal’s new play might be therapeutic. For no matter how frosty the atmosphere might become over the cooking rota, it surely cannot be as grisly as the experiment in communal living on view here.’ Too late to change plans now, and most of us won’t be in a situation where one genius plus wife goes on holiday with another genius plus husband, but an intriguing play for anyone who is going to be bent over a unfamiliar stove in a rented cottage pretending they are Alice Waters (cf. Chez Panisse menus for this week) while being unusually jolly and loquacious.

   Finally, in ten days it’s off to a new play at the National Theatre, also by a young female playwright, Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Her Naked Skin is about London in 1913 when the struggle for the vote was at its height (it faded away after the outbreak of war the following year). I was alerted to the play by my friend Elizabeth Crawford, who is an expert on suffragettes (and has written The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866-1928). Liz and I often discuss suffragette novels as I would love to add one to the Persephone list.  There are curiously few, however the one I hope to do is Constance Maud’s No Surrender (1911). I would ask anyone reading this letter to get hold of a copy and tell me what they think, as several of you kindly did with Earth and High Heaven by Gwethalyn Graham (which we are publishing next Spring); but without finding one in a library it would be almost impossible to do so.

  Here are some interesting pieces: an article in The Times beginning ‘Dead writers are hot this summer’ which quotes Marcella Edwards (with whom we have dealings because she represents the Estate of Monica Dickens) being ‘coltishly enthusiastic about reviving lost authors, particularly those such as Storm Jameson and Frank O’Connor, who she believes could have great popular appeal.’  Will anyone who can think of a way of selling three thousand copies of a Storm Jameson novel please make themselves known at 59 Lamb’s Conduit Street…Then there was an article by Jay Rayner in the Observer on the by now rather tired subject of bloggers versus critics, with this ensuing debate. Lastly, do read this obituary of the amazing-sounding Robert Harling which, apart from anything else, made his novels sound intriguing. At the end there was this suggestion: ‘Forgotten women novelists from previous generations have Virago and Persephone to save them from undeserved oblivion. Someone should do the same for the male of the species, such as Nigel Balchin, Maurice Edelman, Geoffrey Cotterell – and of course Robert Harling.’ But the new Faber Finds seem to be exclusively male writers, and apart from Pamela Hansford Johnson and Elizabeth Goudge Capuchin Classics are pretty male too.  So we are not entirely convinced the male (writer) of the species needs rescuing.

Nicola Beauman
Lamb’s Conduit Street
15th July 2008