How we choose our books

1) Persephone Books arose out of thirty years of being at home with small children: so much time to to rediscover twentieth century women writers; and to buy books for 20p, or go to the London Library and come home with an armful of forgotten books. Once the children were older there was time to read in the British Museum Reading Room and to hunt for books in secondhand bookshops. Now there is the new British Library and the internet.

2) some Persephone titles, such as William – an Englishman, were written about in Nicola Beauman’s book A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914-39 (Virago, 1983, repr. ’89 and ’95) but not reprinted by other feminist presses.

3) this book influenced our choice of titles in other ways, for example in its focus on women’s everyday lives; as a result our titles are different from those of other feminist publishers in that they are more accessible, more domestic, the feminism is ‘softer’.

4) we have to love every book. It is a cliché of publishing that there is no hope that a book will sell unless someone is passionately behind it.

5) people kindly tell us about books and some of them turn out to be wonderful. Miss Pettigrew was suggested by Henrietta Twycross-Martin who then wrote the preface; a reader in Yorkshire lent us A House in the Country by Jocelyn Playfair (of whom we had never heard); the late Neville Braybrooke sent us his wife Isobel English’s novel Every Eye.

6) sometimes we discover books in rather odd ways. Looking to see if any other Elizabeth Jenkins could be reprinted, apart from the wonderful The Tortoise and the Hare (Virago), we found a reviewer had written about her novel Virginia Water that she had ‘not read anything so really lovely, so tenderly and exquisitely right since Susan Glaspell’s Brook Evans.’ At that time we had never heard of Susan Glaspell. And we found Lettice Delmer because it was ‘puffed’ on the flap of a book someone sent us because it was written by their mother.

7) we would prefer to publish more books by American writers – but they are slow to sell if British readers have not heard of them (although our US readership is beginning to expand).

8) occasionally we choose a book and then find that it has an anniversary (eighty years this summer since Katherine Mansfield wrote The Montana Stories, one hundred since the serialisation of The Making of a Marchioness); this does not usually influence our choice of title, but it might mean that we wait a while to publish it, or accelerate the process.

9) we do not in general do books already republished by one of the other feminist houses.

10) we publish mostly women writers and mostly 20th century but within this remit aim for a variety of forms (a love story paired with short stories, a light read paired with something more profound, something fun for Christmas, long books and short) and try to have many different genres – novels that are ‘about’ something, page turners, cookery books, poetry, a book about the suffragettes and the First World War, four about the Second, a ghost story, a biography by a man (we do not want to appear too rigidly feminist), books about Jews, Catholics, nonbelievers, two diaries, a book for children.

11) ideally ‘the novel tells a story’ (E.M.Forster)

12) to conclude: each book must have a special quality to justify its republication.

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 >