Press Coverage Winter 2006

‘Muriel Stuart’s enthusiastic championing of a vanished style of small-scale English gardening is both charming and historically interesting,’ wrote Matthew Dennison in House and Garden. ‘Gardener's Nightcap is, as its title suggests, a series of essays, nuggets, even single paragraphs, on all aspects of gardening, intended for reading last thing at night in the shadowy minutes before sleep. It combines determined practicality with a strongly poetic even fanciful streak. Last century it delighted its first generation of readers: for different reasons, it will delight again.’ And Image magazine in Ireland called Gardener's Nightcap ‘a witty and beautifully illustrated collection of gardening advice.’

EDGE publications’ Jason Salzenstein said that The Runaway ‘is more than just a children’s book. As pure and innocent as it is adventurous and fun to read, the fact that The Runaway is written in English long since past only adds to its charm and amusement. With dialogue like “... for a sensible, clever girl, which you undoubtedly are, you are a great little goose”, how could you not be amused? Elizabeth Anna Hart should be recognised for her sprightly, exciting and endearing writing that has an appeal (to both children and adults) that has lasted well past its time. Lucky for us.’ The same reviewer began his piece about Someone at a Distance by saying, ‘I don’t know if I’m a complete feminist (or was in a former life) but there isn’t a book in Persephone’s collection that I haven’t liked. Someone at a Distance is another excellent selection, and a brilliant and entertaining novel. Of course the fact that it is the story of a “perfectly happy” family and the eerily before-its-time destruction of that marriage (and happiness) could have something to do with why I enjoyed this book so much. Or maybe it was because the seductress that comes to visit is a young French woman, so filled with sensuality that I just couldn’t help but get drawn in. All the books in the Persephone collection are interesting, engaging, and well written - Someone at a Distance, however, has that special something extra that sets it apart... It’s rare find.’

In the Guardian Maxim Jakubowski reviewed The Expendable Man: ‘Dorothy B Hughes is best remembered for The Fallen Sparrow and In a Lonely Place, both of which were made into cult movies. This reissue of her final novel, first published in 1963, is most welcome, an exhilarating no-holds-barred semi-political noir thriller denouncing racial abuse in the American southwest. A doctor picks up an attractive teenage female hitchhiker and runaway on an Arizona road and begins a slow, systematic descent into an American hell. It took real guts to write [this novel] at the time of the Goldwater presidential campaign, Governor Wallace’s declarations and much simmering racism. The book still grips like a vice, and hasn’t dated one bit.’

In an article in the Guardian the ‘food for free’ pioneer Richard Mabey referred to Vicomte de Mauduit's ‘splendidly titled’ They Can't Ration These (1940, Persephone Book No. 54) and the Ministry of Food's own pamphlet, Hedgerow Harvest (1943), both of which ‘moved the Home Front out into the wild, with recipes for the obligatory rose-hip syrup, and sloe and marrow jam: “If possible crack some of the stones and add to the preserve before boiling to give a nutty flavour.” An epicurean touch, but prefaced by the first strictures about picking etiquette: “None of this harvest should be wasted, but be exceedingly careful how you gather it in...don’t injure the bushes or trees. When you pick mushrooms, cut the stalks neatly with a knife, leaving the roots in the ground.”