Letter

The Whipple Wars have hit Private Eye (the British satirical magazine)! It quoted Carmen Callil’s comment in the Guardian that, when she was at Virago, ‘We had our standards.  We had a limit known as the Whipple line, below which we would not sink.’  And then it quoted the Financial Times article about Persephone in which I said that one of the reasons for setting it up ten years ago was to reprint writers like Dorothy Whipple.

Of course Whipple-lovers well understand why the editors at Virago do not like her.  There is a little clue in the Time Out issue for May 22-28 which picked Persephone Books as one of London’s 100 best shops. The literary editor, John O’Connell, chose us as his favourite shop: ‘I love the elegant dove-grey jackets, but mainly I love the writing this shop champions: neglected early C20th “women’s writing” that has a strong focus on domesticity and psychological interiority; the sort of thing male critics of the time dismissed as mundane and middlebrow.’ The clue is in the word domesticity. (And in fact Time Out actually says that we have a strong focus on this and on psychological inferiority. At first we were bemused, as we realised that John O’Connell meant his comment to be a compliment; then we realised it was a typo!) One could have an interesting discussion about Whipple and domesticity; and about interiority; and about inferiority indeed. Perhaps we will one day at a Lunch in the shop…

It is not too late to ‘listen again’ to last week’s episodes of Jane and Prudence; next week's episodes will be going out twice a day until Friday June 6th.  And here is an excellent article by Zadie Smith about Middlemarch. There was also an article about Daniel Deronda and Palestine in the Times Literary Supplement (unfortunately not on line) which made me resolve to reread both it and Reuben Sachs as soon as possible.

Sometimes people ask us where we buy the posters that we have in the Lamb's Conduit Street shop. Onslows are having an auction of some wonderful posters in London on June 25th. We shall have to force ourselves not to go along.

Finally, do read this obituary of the extraordinary Irena Sendler who has just died aged 98. 

Nicola Beauman
30 May 2008
Lamb’s Conduit Street