Press Coverage Summer 2005

In the Independent on Sunday Charlie Lee-Potter reviewed They Were Sisters: ‘It exerts a menacing force from start to finish. I eavesdropped on the lives of Lucy, Charlotte and Vera, compelled to go on but with a sense of simmering dread... By the time Dorothy Whipple came to write her final novel in 1953, the appetite for her subtle, acutely psychologically observed novels had gone but it is satisfying to think that the woman who believed how important it was to live your life well should be enjoying a posthumous triumph. She deserves it.’

In The Spectator Salley Vickers wrote about ‘the sparkling achievements of this accomplished novelist, not the least of which is the ability – rarer today than it should be – simply to entertain. I read this diverting novel on the plane to Australia and the journey flew by... The most original, and compelling, part of the story concerns Charlotte’s treatment at the hands of her husband, Geoffrey. The subtle way in which a misplaced devotion will often fuel its own destruction, and fire its object to renewed cruelties, is a truth revealed by Whipple with chilling accuracy.  A moralist, in the line, if less augustly, of Jane Austen and George Eliot, in her universe unkindness and selfishness and, above all, self-centredness do not escape retribution.’

And in Image magazine Anna Carey commented: ‘Although this compulsively readable novel was first published in 1943, its depiction of an abusive marriage feels unsettingly modern.  Dorothy Whipple has the ability to make her readers care about almost every character.’

In the same review she described Virginia Woolf’s Flush as ‘a very enjoyable retelling of a famous love story as as well as a smart feminist critique of gender roles... it is a seriously witty, angry examination of the way Victorian women were treated like petted lapdogs’; and the Virginia Woolf Bulletin praised our ‘beautifully produced’ edition of Flush with its ‘excellent preface by Sally Beauman... what she is demonstrating is that there is much autobiography in the biography – there are notable parallels between Barrett’s and Woolf’s illness, their domineering fathers and their watchful husbands.’

On the Penguin website Caro Fraser said: ‘I read a lovely book called The Priory by Dorothy Whipple. Reading it was rather like watching an old black-and-white movie. It was a joy, and gives fascinating insights into family life and class structures in the period just before the Second World War.’

On the Guardian readers web page Chris Scarlett from Sheffield wrote about her ‘discovery of Persephone Books. Someone at a Distance, Mrs Pettigrew Lives for a Day and Fidelity all enraptured. Coming from a different place from Virago and Women’s Press books, I found these novels addressing universal issues of women’s lives, albeit from a quieter and apparently less politicised stance – but don’t be fooled…’

Finally: last winter Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, based the Romanes Lecture at Oxford on the life of Etty Hillesum (An Interrupted Life: Diaries and Letters 1941-3, Persephone Book No. 5). ‘She died in Auschwitz in 1943 and left behind her a journal for the two years before her deportation and death, an extraordinarily full and absorbing document which chronicles a complex sexual and emotional life, a deepening immersion in Rilke and Dostoevsky and a religious conversion of a very unconventional order.’ The full text is at: www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons.