The women’s books the world forgot
For 25 years Persephone has been making cult figures of long-overlooked authors. Its founder tells Susie Mesure how she – and her iconic grey covers – have helped to spark a resurgence in heritage publishing
For decades, Dorothy Whipple was just another forgotten female author, her books long out of print, her portraits of domestic feminism long out of favour. Then came Persephone Books. Thanks to the niche publisher, which specialises in overlooked women writers, Whipple, who died in 1966, is now a cult sensation.
“I cannot tell you how much our readers love Dorothy Whipple,” says Nicola Beauman, the 79-yearold matriarch of Persephone, who set up the business in 1999 to give new life to books she felt were being wrongly neglected. Tickets to a talk celebrating the author’s work (“Wild for Whipple”) – part of a festival in Bath today to celebrate the publisher’s quartercentury anniversary – sold out in 10 minutes.
Over the next three days, Persephone’s loyal fan base (which includes 77,000 Instagram followers) will pack out various locations across Bath, in the Assembly Rooms and the Holburne Museum among others. Topics up for discussion include history through Persephone Books; the gentle art of domesticity; and the rise of heritage publishing now that Persephone has sparked something of a vogue for giving old books a new lease of life in covetable new editions.
It was Virago Press, founded in 1973, that was the first to see the opportunity in reviving classic women’s fiction that had fallen out of fashion. But its founder Carmen Callil thought Whipple’s work too middlebrow for her imprint, according to Beauman.
Whipple’s 1953 novel Someone at a Distance was one of 12 books that Persephone published in its first year; others included Mariana by Monica Dickens (1940) and Marghanita Laski’s The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953). Initial sales were not strong.
“I knew [the books] were good. They are good. But they didn’t sell,” Beauman recalls, lamenting her “puppy-like” enthusiasm in publishing quite so many titles at once. (She used some inheritance from her father, who was an international lawyer, to bankroll her venture.)
But then, four years later, a woman brought in a copy of her mother’s favourite book, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson. This sweet, feel-good 1938 novel, about a governess and a night-club singer, was Persephone’s 21st book: it became a word-of-mouth hit – my best friend pressed her copy into my hands some years ago – and was made into a film starring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams.
“It was a fairy story,” Beauman tells me while nursing a cup of green tea in a Persephone mug. “Miss Pettigrew was a bestseller and then they all began to sell.”
We are chatting in the back of the Persephone bookshop in Bath, where the business relocated three years ago from London’s Bloomsbury. Beauman’s slight frame is all but buried under piles of books and mountains of boxes packed with “merch” for the forthcoming festival, which will coincide with a change of helm.
“I hate the word retire, but I’m going to take a back seat,” says Beauman. She is handing the reins to her daughter Fran, who already works alongside her mother. The business is very much a family affair: when I visit, one of Beauman’s granddaughters, 16-year-old Esther, is in charge of the shop floor.
The 18th-century building, which has been home to everything from a deli and a dentist’s surgery to an Indian carpet shop over the years, suits the Persephone aesthetic, which mixes muted grey covers with vintage print endpapers, many taken from designs by Bloomsbury group artists such as Duncan Grant.
The shop has shelf space for all 150 books that Persephone has republished; most focus on the interwar years, when women were writing compelling fiction. As to why that should have been, Beauman thinks it has to be “something to do with the First World War and fewer women getting married”, leaving them with more time and head space to write.
Persephone’s authors include those better known for their children’s books, such as Noel Streatfeild (Ballet Shoes), Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden), and Richmal Crompton (the Just William series), as well as lesser-known works from writers including Elizabeth von Arnim (best known for The Enchanted April) and Katherine Mansfield (The Garden Party).
There are around 10 by male writers such as Leonard Woolf, Virginia’s publisher husband, and RC Sherriff, who wrote the play Journey’s End. And there are even cookbooks.
“Most feminist publishers wouldn’t do cookery books because why should cookery be feminist? But to us, because we are interested in domestic feminism, cookery books are crucial, so we have a dozen,” says Beauman, whose own book, A Very Great Profession, first published in 1983, explores women writers of the interwar period. (It has been republished by Persephone as its 78th book.)
In one corner, there is a special bookshelf for the “Fifty Books We Wish We Had Published”, which includes titles by EM Forster (Beauman’s favourite author), Elizabeth Taylor, Fumiko Enchi, and Elizabeth Bowen.
Elsewhere, posters with wartime messaging vie with more recent designs, such as Senator Mitch McConnell’s put-down of Senator Elizabeth Warren: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” blares one in black and white, a sentiment that sums up much feminist history, especially that found between the elegant covers of most Persephone titles.
Bronwen Douglas, who helps out at a nearby Oxfam bookshop,
Persephone reminded readers that books could – and should – be celebrated as objects
is a typical Persephone devotee. She has around 60 of its titles and is collecting the entire series.
“I love how their books are by people writing about the period they’re living in,” she says. “One recent book [I read] was about what was happening when London was being bombed, which really brought home how many bombs fell in London at that time.”
Her favourite writer is Whipple: “There isn’t anything by her that I haven’t liked.”
It rather begs the question of why writers such as Whipple, who was dubbed “the Jane Austen of the 20th century” by English novelist JB Priestley, stopped being published.
Beauman (inset) blames snobbery. Some people – namely the academic community – shared Virago’s Callil’s view that Whipple is “middlebrow”, compared with authors such as Rose Macaulay or Rosamond Lehmann. “Whipple has very strong views on things like domestic violence,” she says. “But you can’t do literary criticism on her. You can’t analyse her prose like you can with Mollie Panter-Downes. You can’t find imagery. You can’t do all those things that people have been taught that that’s what you do to literature. If you say she’s a page-turner, or she’s humane, that’s not a relevant standard.” Although Persephone is a small, independent publisher, which makes it unlikely to shift mountains of books, Beauman estimates they have sold at least 20,000 copies of Someone at a Distance. “All those 20,000 people will have loved it,” she adds. And therein lies the secret to Persephone’s success: once someone has enjoyed one Persephone book, they tend to be hooked. (I speak from experience.) Around 70 per cent of sales come from mail order: either readers who buy a book per month via a subscription for £190 a year or send a set of six books to friends for £90. Or, for £1,800, you can buy the full collection.
Becky Brown, who co-heads literary agent Curtis Brown’s heritage arm, says Persephone’s “curatorial eye” is key to its success. “You know their books will have passed muster,” she says.
Lucy Scholes, an editor at McNally Editions, an independent American publisher that also publishes neglected books, agrees, adding that Persephone’s strong sense of identity helps to keep its readers loyal. “They choose wonderful books, plus their branding is a huge help. Their books are elegant; a lot of consumers want good books and good design.”
Asked about the choice of grey, Beauman is circumspect, hailing it as a “nice but dull” time-saving initiative. “All I had to do was to choose the endpapers.”
“In many ways, Nicola reinvigorated heritage fiction publishing,” says Rebeka Russell, who set up the heritage publisher Manderley Press in 2021. “When most publishers were focused entirely on reducing production costs and maximising the number of books sold, Nicola focused on what her readers really valued: a sense of discovery of forgotten authors and titles, of being part of a community of bookish enthusiasts.
“Persephone reminded readers that books could and should be celebrated as objects – as pleasing in the hand as on the shelf.”
The success of Persephone, she adds, “was instrumental in giving me, and indeed a whole generation of independent publishers, the confidence to set up independently, and to really listen to what readers wanted – and then use non-traditional publishing approaches to get high-quality books direct to customers”.
Although the publisher’s 150th book, The Third Persephone Book of Short Stories, features a story from 1996, its most recent novel was first published in 1975: One Afternoon by Siân James. That’s quite recent enough for Beauman: “I haven’t really moved on in the sense that I still think the women writing between the wars and into the 50s were exceptionally good.”
Of course, you don’t have to take Beauman’s word for it: the world of Whipple et al awaits.
Persephone Books is at 8 Edgar Buildings, Bath. The Persephone Festival takes place across Bath from today until Sunday. ‘The Third Persephone Book of Short Stories’ is out now (£14, persephonebooks.co.uk)