Persephone Books Nos 1-12

We of course hope that readers of the Persephone Quarterly have read all our books! But for those who have not...

The effect of war on ordinary lives is a strong Persephone theme and our very first book was Cicely Hamilton's 1919 novel William - an Englishman, an 'extraordinary fiction classic' (New Statesman) about a young couple caught up in the First World War; Persephone Book No. 11 was Julian Grenfell: His life and the times of his death, the 1976 biography of the First World War poet by Nicholas Mosley.

These two books make an extremely interesting pair, the working-class clerk and his suffragette wife confronted by the grim reality of Belgium in the first weeks of August 1914, contrasting with the life of a brilliant young man who seemed to find true happiness only in the horrors of war.

In both these books concepts of pacifism and aggression are continually in the authors' minds, but another theme common to both of them is mothers (Persephone herself was, after all, only rescued from the underworld because of her mother's pleas). We considered changing the title of Julian Grenfell to Ettie and Julian, since the stifling relationship between mother and son is such a strong thread in the book; the reason we did not (apart from Nicholas Mosley's understandable affection for the original title) was because of An Interrupted Life: once people have read that extraordinary book they always refer to it as 'Etty'.

In William ­ an Englishman Cicely Hamilton shows us, in one deft scene, how completely William was under the thumb of his mother ­ until she released him, through her death, into the world of socialism and suffragettes and the love of his wife Griselda. But Ettie Grenfell might never have released Julian; nor did she have any interest in feminism. 'It was as if Ettie had gained enough confidence in her feminine power - and indeed amusement at the way in which men played their own games with power - to imagine that on this account she did not have to fight any battles' writes Nicholas Mosley in his Persephone Preface.

The imagery of battles runs through Few Eggs and No Oranges as well, since they were raging overhead and all around. Vere Hodgson was a unique observer of everyday life in Notting Hill during the Second World War and many have commented on her ability to record what she saw given the difficult circumstances in which she was living. One reason I think was that her job gave her easy access to a desk and a typewriter; another was that she lived alone, and therefore her diary became a lifeline; and a third was that she originally wrote for her relations and wanted to file her weekly letter.

Mollie Panter-Downes also filed a weekly letter during the war, in her case for readers of the New Yorker, and found time to write short stories. 'The revelation of 1999 for me,' said Felipe Fernandez-Armesto in The Independent, 'was boldly published, beautifully designed, dazzlingly written. The stories in Good Evening, Mrs Craven first appeared in the New Yorker in wartime. Mollie Panter-Downes is as profound as Katherine Mansfield, restrained as Jane Austen, sharp as Dorothy Parker.' And Angela Huth in the Daily Mail wrote that 'as a lover of short stories (these) are my especial find. Panter-Downes is marvellous on the inner states of outwardly calm folk abiding by their admirably old-fashioned priorities.'

To read the diaries and letters of Etty Hillesum is, unfortunately, to enter a completely different universe: 'The letters from Westerbork are frankly harrowing' commented Eva Figes in a lead review in The Guardian in December last year, quoting Etty's words, 'It is a complete madhouse here: we shall have to feel ashamed of it for three hundred years.' Yet the diaries and letters are uplifting because of the strength of Etty's serenity, her vision and her never-failing compassion and humour. 'All that mattters now is to be kind to each other with all the goodness that is in us' she wrote at her desk in Amsterdam in the dark days of 1942. Of all our books, Etty Hillesum's An Interrupted Life is the one that we are proudest to have brought back into print in this country.

But Susan Glaspell's Fidelity is the novel we believe to be the greatest of those we have published so far. We are convinced that it will come to be seen as a great American classic, and that it will be made into a film. Everyone who has read it has lent the book to their friends or bought more copies and many have written appreciative letters to us; the most recent letter from a reader said that she thinks 'it is the sort of book which moves one to new positions. She has more of an understanding of men than Edith Wharton and it is a far better book than Sinclair Lewis's Main Street.'

The other great American novel we have reprinted is The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. It has an extremely modern theme. It is about a husband and wife who swop roles and is also about children who are unhappy, but flourish when looked after by their father. All this in 1924. Anyone who has a partner who stays at home with children should read this wonderful book.

A third American book that is focused on family life was defined in the Evening Standard as being about 'the shortfall between romantic dreams and married reality' ­ It's Hard to be Hip Over Thirty and Other Tragedies of Married Life by Judith Viorst. First published in the early 1970s, it is impossible to convey the qualities of these funny, compassionate, realistic, wry poems without quoting from them; you can read two of the poems here including the wonderful short and to the point 'Advice from a Mother to Her Married Son' (which begins: 'The answer to do you love me isn't, I married you, didn't I?', a response E.M.Delafield's Provincial Lady would surely have received if she had asked the question of Robert). We had a Persephone Book at Lunchtime celebrating Judith Viorst's work with a memorable reading of the poems and an extremely interesting talk about 1960s New York life.

Mothers seem to have been mentioned so often already in this piece that readers may be beginning to wonder if not being one rules them out as Persephone readers. But we all have mothers; or we have or have had family life; and we are all aware that our happiness or otherwise is dependent on our early family relationships. That is why one critic made such a pertinent observation about Someone at a Distance when she said that the first sentence reads like George Eliot. For it is making a deeply moral point that might have been made in Middlemarch, which is that the central tragedy of the book, the destruction of a family, will come about because of the mother's egoism: 'Widowed, in the house her husband had built with day and night nurseries and a music-room, as if the children would stay there for ever, instead of marrying and going off at the earliest possible moment, old Mrs North yielded one day to a long-felt desire to provide herself with company.'

The coming tragedy is implicit in this superb sentence: it is because, spoilt by her husband, Mrs North resentfully feels that now she 'didn't come first with anybody' that disaster comes about for her children. Inevitably there will be some readers who think Someone at a Distance is just the story of a suburban husband's adultery. But it has a moral acuteness rarely matched in twentieth century fiction: it is morally 'engaged' as we used to say at Cambridge in the days of Leavis.

In contrast, Monica Dickens's Mariana has a lightness of touch and humour and above all readability almost unmatched among our books. 'Written during the war, but as fresh and funny now as then' (The Spectator) it is the book we recommend for teenage readers, bracketing it with Dusty Answer and Cold Comfort Farm as three unmissables for that age group; and it is surely no coincidence that these books' first-time authors were all in their twenties. Mariana is also ideal for the bed-bound or the vulnerable; there is something hugely enjoyable about it, and sometimes it is quite a relief, after all, not to have to be morally engaged.

Another book which can be read on one level as simply a relatively light (if scary) book is The Victorian Chaise-longue; but on another it is a powerful feminist statement about being trapped. Melanie, in the 1950s, is a young woman whose husband and doctor, having smothered her with kindness, render her child-like; she is then trapped in the 1860s and rendered equally helpless by her bullying sister. Ensnared first by male domination and then by Victorian morality, she, as Milly, cannot escape from the grip of either. House and Garden, praising the book for being 'beautifully reprinted', commented: 'It is the skilful assimilation of 19th and 20th century literary conventions that makes the novel so particularly horrifying - its distillation of Victorian Gothic horror within the stricter verisimilitude of the modern novel.'

Food of the Victorian period features in our cookery book, Good Things in England, and many of the recipes would have been familiar to the Bronte sisters. The recipe for bilberry pies they are thought to have eaten at Haworth inspired the New Statesman to adapt it for its readers ('drain a 450g jar of Polish bilberries..serve with cream to keep out the wuthering cold.')

Like all classic culinary works, Good Things is a pleasure to read,' observed the Sunday Telegraph. We were very pleased when a speaker on The Food Programme chose it as his 'number one British cookery book.'

Ordering books from Persephone

You can see a complete list of Persephone Books and order online here. Or you can email us, telephone on 020 7242 9292, send a fax to 020 7242 9272 or write to the following address: Persephone Books Ltd, 59 Lamb's Conduit Street, London WC1N 3NB All Persephone Books cost £10 each plus £2 postage (see more information on ordering). We can now send a book a month for six or twelve months - more >