Press Coverage Spring 2007

In the Journal of Katherine Mansfield, said Hermione Lee in the Guardian, her ‘startling, vivid, intimate voice still comes pouring off these pages… She is always driving herself along, with the utmost rigour. These are formidably self-lacerating, self-critical diaries. She knows, when she admits to it, that she is writing against the clock, saying of one of her best stories, “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”, “I wrote as fast as possible for fear of dying before the story was sent.” As her admirer Elizabeth Bowen wrote, in a tribute to her in 1956, “there is never enough of the time a writer wants – but hers was cut so short, one is aghast.” Mansfield’s writing, says Bowen – and it is truest of all of the Journal – often feels “interrupted… momentarily waiting to be gone on with. Page after page gives off the feeling of being still warm from the touch. Fresh from the pen. Where is she – our missing contemporary?”’ And the Daily Mail said about the Journal: ‘You’ll find none of the vanity, score settling or tittle-tattle that mars so many journals. Though Katherine Mansfield bemoans the rain, her persistent illness, even her writing, it’s impossible not to love Mansfield’s candour and be drawn in by her impassioned voice. An elegant reissue of an essential writer.’

The Literary Review called The Expendable Man ‘a painfully vivid portrait of the American South in the Sixties, deftly written and interesting. Blink and you'll miss the one vital piece of information.’ While The Gloss described it as ‘a gripping thriller.’

‘One of my favourite publishers at the moment,’ Sarah Waters wrote in The Times, ‘is Persephone Books, whose list of reprinted women’s fiction contains some small masterpieces. Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s tense The Blank Wall is perfect for
crime fans. Dorothy Whipple’s They Were Sisters and Someone at a Distance are compelling stories of domestic trauma. The books look great, too.’

Rachel Cooke in the New Statesman chose as one of her books of the year ‘Persephone Books’ lovely new edition of Plats du Jour by Primrose Boyd and Patience Gray. When it was first published in 1957, this sold 100,000 copies. It was also one of Jane Grigson’s favourite cookbooks, which should be recommendation enough for anyone.’ Tom Jaine in the Guardian thought that this ‘remarkable description of bourgeois cooking as it should be from the 1950s leaves current [cookery book] authors standing’; Country Life called the recipes 'delightful and full of period charm. Plats du Jour did not deserve to disappear, and Persephone has done us a service in rediscovering it’; while in the New Statesman Kate Taylor admired its historical value, seeing it as an early example of the lifestyle cookery book: ‘it can feel inaccessible – for one thing old measurements such as gills have not been updated – but if you persevere, the plat du jour principle yields some wonderful food. My first efforts, poulet a la savoyarde (chicken braised with ceps) and la garbure, a thick Basque soup, were not half bad.’

India Knight told readers of She magazine’s ‘On My Bookshelf ’ column: ‘I love reprints of old books like the ones produced by Persephone Books. Its edition of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson is just my favourite; it’s a delight to look at and to hold, and it's also the one I turn to when I want to be uplifted and cheered. It’s about a mousy little governess who is sent to the wrong address for a job interview and ends up becoming a companion to an exotically glamorous nightclub singer. Miss Pettigrew’s life is transformed. It’s sweet, but not sugary, and just leaves you feeling so happy. That’s what the best books do.

Lastly, Compass (for garden designers) said that ‘anyone who is an enthusiastic gardener’ will enjoy the ‘quirky and whimsical’ Gardener’s Nightcap.