'Open Book' on Radio 4

Charlie Lee-Potter began by saying that she was talking to ‘the woman who has created a unique publishing house to resurrect forgotten works by fine women writers, sandwiched between the most beautiful paperback covers I have ever seen. Blockbusters they’re not, big sellers they won’t be, but these are the kind of books you simply won’t want to lend to your friends in case they don’t give them back.'

‘I had got it into my head that the look of a book should not matter, not with a novel anyway, it’s the words that count, but Nicola Beauman, founder of Persephone Books, has changed my mind.

She resurrects the fine but neglected stories of women writers like Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Berridge, and Isobel English. Their work, sharp as a blade and just as exciting and acute now as it was when it was written in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, is slipped between silvery grey covers, each faced with glorious endpapers, photographs of rich and colourful fabrics to suit the period and content of each book. Ruth Adam’s book, A Woman’s Place, gets a 1950s design by Lucienne Day. Oriel Malet’s Marjory Fleming, first published in 1946, tells the story of a young girl living in Scotland in the early 19th century; this book gets a Paisley shawl woven in 1810 as its endpaper.’

Asked where the idea for Persephone Books had come from, NB replied: ‘I was a writer and my special field was women novelists: I had written a book about them in the early 1980s and I wrote Virago introductions and gave lectures. But I was always lending books to friends, and my favourite writers were not always writers that Virago approved of and I began to think about reprinting them myself. . . I decided to do mail order because I wanted the books to look as wonderful as very expensive books, but you can’t then sell in bookshops at a price that particularly women, but anyway our kind of readers, can afford.’

We then turned to ‘the randomness of fame’: CL-P described Elizabeth Berridge as ‘a fine, fine writer. . . [but] beautifully written as her stories are, many people have not heard of them.’ Elizabeth modestly commented that ‘it’s just lucky if you have a reviewer who discovers you, there are so many people writing. . .’ and NB mentioned ‘commercial forces. . . the reason why some books sell and others do not is not always to do with merit. . . ’ CL-P then concluded, ‘You can get your hands on these silvery lost masterpieces by mail order.’ (And we are pleased to say that 425 Radio 4 listeners did so.)