Press Coverage Spring 2006

Norah Hoult's There Were No Windows, which is about the last years of Ford Madox Ford's lover Violet Hunt, was chosen as one of his Spectator books of the year by Alan Judd, Ford'a biographer. He called it 'intelligent, unsparing, generous, ironic and funny... Written with nice social observation, it deals with sadness but it's not depressing.’ In the Glasgow Herald Christopher Lee’s books of the year were ‘reprints from the wonderful Persephone Books: Marghanita Laski’s The Village. Love life and station in life. Forget studious histories. Here’s upstairs having to make do with downstairs. And The Hopkins Manuscript: nothing like his haunting play Journey’s End. If you think global warming, then read it.’ Amanda Craig in the Independent wrote that in 2005 she was ‘astonished by the power and intelligence of The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, which tackles the issue of working mothers and the depression caused by thwarted female energies with brilliant perceptiveness.’ Finally, in the Guardian Readers’ Books of the Year, a reader from Belfast chose Saplings: ‘Happy childhood holidays at the seaside are contrasted with the dispersal of the children to various relatives; they narrate their mother’s nervous breakdown and descent into alcoholism following their father’s death. With endpapers by Marion Dorn evoking Matisse’s decoupage, the volume is a triumph of content and form; a delight to read and treasure.’

Just before Christmas How to Run Your Home Without Help was written about and widely reviewed. In ‘Critic’s Choice’ in the Daily Mail Val Hennessy said: ‘Dusters ahoy! For a laugh and a half, do read this gripping reprint... of a slice of social history which unwittingly offers a fascinatingly detailed picture of the household duties and everyday skills once expected of women. The tedious lives of our mothers and grandmothers are wonderfully revealed in her pages, and, as we read, we experience uncomfortable little twinges of shame about our own slovenly attitude to house-keeping.’ In the Independent Christina Patterson called How to Run Your Home ‘a salutary, and comic, reminder of an age when wifely duties were as strong to your house as your husband', while the Church Times described it as ‘another delight from Persephone Books’.

A London Child of the 1870s was given a 5-star review in Metro. Nina Caplan called it ‘not a story of Victorian repression but a joyous recounting of a delightful childhood... Molly Hughes is lively and unassuming, allowing for neither boredom nor condescension.’

In the Guardian Matthew Fort wrote about Kitchen Essays ‘conjuring up a bygone world of “Country friends to a Christmas shopping luncheon”, “Food for artists and speakers” and “Batchelors entertaining”, dispensing sound advice, wisdom and eminently practical recipes along the way.’

Benjamin Pogrund in the Journal of Southern African Studies called The World that Was Ours ‘an exceptional book when it first appeared which is even more so now, offering a personal, contemporaneous account of the lives of anti-apartheid activists... It will endure as a finely written record of the moment-by-moment courage that went into opposition to apartheid.’

In a long and charming article about Persephone Books in the Ottawa Citizen (and other syndicated Canadian newspapers) Jamie Portman wrote about ‘a bookshop unlike any other in London – and it’s the public face of a publishing firm unique in the English-speaking world.’