Press Coverage Summer 2004

The newly-launched books magazine Slightly Foxed wrote a feature about us, under the heading ‘A Publisher in Bloomsbury’, calling us ‘one of the real success stories of modern independent publishing’. In it Simon Brett first reviewed Greenery Street, ‘less a story, more a series of incidents, it has a mock-philosophical leisureliness which can explode with impeccable timing into a sequence of comic moments… It is a pleasure to read, an impeccably crafted, very English comedy of manners; and, at moments, can be something more... In complete contrast, Manja begins on a note of edge-of-the-seat cinematic tension: 112 pages on, at the end of Part One, which I read virtually at a sitting... the reader is left gasping... What makes the book valuable as a historical record and also successful as fiction is the same: it does not rely on our knowledge of What Was To Come. The writing is quite free of the portentousness of hindsight.’

The Irish magazine Image commented: ‘Small and specialist publishing companies that actually survive are a rarity these days, which is why Persephone Books’ fifth anniversary is a real cause for celebration. The secret of their success lies in a happy union of style and content. For devotees the seasons are marked by their quarterly reprints and the latest two do not disappoint. Margaret Bonham’s writing in The Casino is cool, wry and sometimes touching. The other spring title is Lettice Cooper’s hugely enjoyable 1936 novel The New House which, on the surface, is just the simple story of a family moving from one large house to a small one, but is utterly gripping, its tension rising from the apparently simple question of whether likable Rhoda will break free of her domineering mother.’

And the Guardian wrote about The New House: ‘It is tempting to describe Rhoda Powell, the 30-plus, stay-at-home daughter of a widowed mother, as Brookner-esque, even though Lettice Cooper wrote this wonderfully understated novel several decades before Anita Brookner mapped the defining features of quietly unhappy middle-class women… Though it is clear where Cooper’s sympathies lie, she does not preach revolution but shows how difficult it was in interwar Britain to escape the expectations of class and upbringing.’

In The Spectator Kate Chisholm described Lettice Cooper as ‘an intensely domestic novelist, unravelling in minute detail the tight web of family relations’ but one who is also ‘acutely aware of what goes on beyond the garden gate… The exposé of a family under strain because of changing times is curiously more vivid and real than in many novels about family life written today, mostly, I suspect, because of Cooper's masterly use of Chekhov’s “telling detail”.’

The website womenwriters.com recommended Lettice Delmer as ‘a page-turner, a novel that can be read slowly and again to appreciate the fine turnings of phrase and the elegant verse’; the Bournemouth Daily Echo’s verdict on Someone at a Distance was ‘a great, compulsive, melodramatic, page-turning read’ and about
The Casino it wrote: ‘Heaven is snuggling down with an elegant book and a box of chocolates. Persephone can always be relied upon to provide the former...
An assortment of highly readable stories, both funny and sharp, written in spare, direct prose.’

Finally Nottingham County Lit magazine said about The Priory that it is 'the third Whipple novel to be republished by Persephone Books. Each one had my rapt attention. Her sharp eye for detail and the nuances of family relationships together with her wry wit are a delight.’