Books

‘I am doing it for the books’

By Rebecca Tyrrel

I discovered Nicola Beauman when I read Morgan, her 1993 biography of EM Forster. It was a book that inspired me not just to re-read great swathes of Forster and enjoy them much more, but perhaps to one day have a go at literary biography myself. A decade or so of procrastination later and for the purposes of re-motivation I read Morgan for a second time and decided that if there was a blueprint for the genre then Beauman’s was it.

So I Googled the author to find out more about her and discovered that in 1998 she founded Persephone Books, a small, independent publishing company. She’s still running it and in recent years Persephone has taken off commercially.

This is her day job and she works tirelessly from a tiny office at the back of her bookshop in an early 1700s building in an old London thoroughfare that is now a little bit fashionable, Lamb’s Conduit Street in WC1. Beauman is surrounded by shelves of beautifully produced reprints of what she calls “rediscovered” (rather than “forgotten”) 20th-century novels, short stories, cookery books and journals.

There is a Persephone Books website to generate further sales and the titles are also available on Amazon. A new Persephone Classics collection is being distributed by Pan Macmillan and in March another shop, small and very tempting with seagrass flooring and grey shelving, opened in Kensington Church Street. This second shop, which despite its doll’s house proportions is surprisingly roomy, is being run by Sophie de Brant, a friend of Beauman’s, and she has filled the shelves not just with Persephone titles but with other works, including poetry and children’s books.

It is, says Beauman with glee, sheer, fortunate coincidence that as well as all this current burgeoning of her company, her biggest selling title, the very funny Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day by Winifred Watson, has been made into a film starring Frances McDormand. The film, about a strait-laced nanny who gets caught up in a day in the life of an air-headed nightclub singer, has received good reviews and performed well at the US box office. It opens in the UK in August.

So, happily but busily, she beavers away, commissioning prefaces, writing Persephone newsletters, organising Persephone events including lunches, teas and literary talks in various towns, houses or gardens – all set in locations that are relevant to specific titles. She is surrounded in her office by cardboard boxes that are full of books just arrived and books just departing. There are mousetraps to be emptied in the old, unaltered basement and attractive, evocative window displays to be arranged in the front – daffodils, a hat, a vintage dress. These arrayed objects help to attract customers. (She says there is more than enough passing trade to pay the rent.) And if those customers want help, faced with the 78 books in their uniform, soft dove grey Persephone covers, either Beauman or her one full-time assistant will guide them through and send them away happy with a Winifred Watson or a Dorothy Whipple to start them off.

Beauman, who is 63, has a young, friendly face, salt-and pepper-coloured bobbed hair and a fashionably tweedy, academic air. As she sits among the boxes with some bread and butter and a cup of tea, I venture to suggest, in an attempt to put my finger on the specific appeal of the Persephone Book, that knowing about Persephone and being a regular customer is a little like belonging to a club. But Beauman is not happy with this idea. She puts her neat feet together in their lace-up brogues and says, both apologetically and firmly, that the word “club” makes her bristle a little because it suggests exclusion. “You see I am very proud of the fact that our mailing list [12,000 names and addresses] includes virtually all social groupings. So I don’t like the word ‘club’ but I can see what you are trying to say and maybe we could think of a better word – perhaps we could say that the people who buy Persephone books are ‘like-minded’. I think we could be happy with that.”

She cites Someone At A Distance, a novel by Dorothy Whipple – a bestseller for Persephone that was first published in 1953. This is one of the books in the Persephone Classics range now getting a wider distribution through Macmillan and with new full colour covers. Whipple is an important novelist to talk about in the context of Persephone’s diverse mailing list because, as Beauman explains, “All types used to read Dorothy Whipple, her earlier novels were massive bestsellers, and I am trying to bring her back to everyone, not just a club or a coterie.” And this wanting to resuscitate out of print titles is what Persephone is all about. “I am doing it for the books”, she says, “and I know that sounds sentimental but really I am.”

I don’t believe for a moment she is being disingenuous, though, as she herself acknowledges, “Isn’t it the dream of so many people to run a book shop?” Yes, and to stock it with one’s favourite books, and know all the books inside out so that one can really explain them to a customer as Beauman is able to do. I defy anyone not to read a Whipple after a Beauman “sell”. Her love for the books is contagious but Whipple’s appeal to “everyone” is easy to see. She lived through a fascinating time in this country’s history and she was an author who wrote very simply and sparely as well as beautifully and compellingly.

And among all those types who happened to read her was Beauman’s German mother, Eleanore “Lore” Mann, a successful lawyer and judge. She and Beauman’s father, FA Mann, the renowned international lawyer, came to England from Germany in 1933 and Beauman says: “My mother learnt her English on Galsworthy but also on authors like Dorothy Whipple.”

She is loath, however, to give this as a reason for her own particular passion for women writers of this era; writers such as Monica Dickens, Marghanita Laski, Mollie Panter-Downes, Richmal Crompton and EM Delafield, all authors of books that are now Persephone titles. It is a passion that is also evidenced by the subject Beauman chose for her own, first book, A Very Great Profession: The Women’s Novel 1914-1939.

“ I am very interested in that period between the wars. You see, at Cambridge, I just wasn’t very happy reading English because I happened not to be interested in Pope or Jane Austen but I felt that I should be because everyone else was. So I didn’t get a good degree but you can’t help the things that you are interested in. And then I realised pretty quickly that I was interested in these women writers and I got a contract to write my book.”

She didn’t write it then, though, because, she says: “I had too many babies and life took over.” She has five children from two marriages. Her first husband, Nick Lacey, was an architect and they have three children: Josh, a children’s author, Olivia, an events organiser, and William, a conductor. Then, 32 years ago she married Chris Beauman, an economist and the former husband of novelist Sally Beauman and they have two children: Fran, an author and children’s television presenter and Ned, a journalist.

So it wasn’t until she was in her late 30s that Beauman finally started writing A Very Great Profession, which was published by Virago in 1983. “And because it is 25 years old”, she explains, “and with great diffidence I am reprinting it myself as a Persephone book.” She really means the diffidence bit, rare is the woman who is at once so accomplished and knowledgeable yet so instinctively modest.

Like all Persephone books, Beauman’s new reprint of A Very Great Profession comes with its own bookmark with its own individual design. This one features a film still of Celia Johnson playing Laura Jesson, the middle-class wife and mother in the 1945 film Brief Encounter. It was, as she explains in the introduction to her book, the image she kept in her mind, “during the years of breeding, nurturing and nursery tea”. It is also the image that explains much of the thinking behind many of the Persephone books. What, Beauman wanted to know, was the novel in Laura Jesson’s shopping basket? What kind of stories were women such as Jesson reading? What names were the real middle class housewives toting to and from the library every week on their shopping days?

“It seemed so strange that an enormous body of fiction should influence and delight a whole generation and then be ignored or dismissed,” writes Beauman in her book. “It soon became clear that those novels which school, university and critical dogma had chosen to ignore were, to me, infinitely greater and more memorable than those which had for so long and so regularly appeared on reading lists.”

And so it is that many of the Persephone titles are easy, unputdownable stories of the Brief Encounter ilk about ordinary lives during that interesting time between the wars. They sit on the painted grey shelves in the Lamb’s Conduit Street and Kensington High Street shops alongside brilliant Katherine Mansfield’s bleak but inspirational Journal, the diaries and letters of Etty Hillesum describing life in Amsterdam under the Nazis and The World That Was Ours, Hilda Bernstein’s account of the events leading to the Rivonia trial during which her husband Rusty was acquitted while Nelson Mandela received a life sentence.

“You know when I was growing up”, says Beauman, “we were very smug because we didn’t buy South African oranges and, of course, we knew that it was terrible in South Africa but to read what Hilda and Rusty Bernstein did before they escaped, well, I am very proud of having that book, and Amy Levy’s Reuben Sachs [a novel about women in the Anglo-Jewish community in London in the late 19th century], which is one of the rawest books you could read. And then”, she says lightening and smiling, “we’ve got the cookery books and Richmal Crompton’s Family Roundabout.” So it is a diverse list about which Beauman feels quite protective. “Sort of possessive and paternal.” But, as the readers’ letters published in the Persephone newsletter illustrate, she is happy to give detractors a platform alongside the devotees.

She doesn’t quite know, however, what she feels about those who “collect” the books except that their motives should first and foremost lie in wanting to read the text rather than in wanting to acquire a set. But the books are numbered, and I have to admit to a certain compulsion to start at number one and work my way through. (It is possible to buy all 78 for £650.) One of my favourites so far is Flush, Virginia Woolf’s miraculously unsentimental biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel. I love its brown marbled endpapers too but the design that makes me want to get my sofa recovered is one from a 1925 block printed cretonne. It is inside Denis Mackail’s Greenery Street and is nicely evocative of drawing rooms. (Mackail is one of Persephone’s five male authors – Nicholas Mosley, Leonard Woolf, Duff Cooper and RC Sherriff are the others.)

The endpaper designs are chosen by Beauman to convey an era – they will have been produced if not in the year then certainly close to the time of the novel’s first publication – and also for their relevance to the plot of the book. Someone at a Distance, for instance, has a 1950s furnishing fabric print featuring the same colour as the nails of the unfaithful husband’s lover. A Persephone logo appears discreetly on all titles – a simple line drawing of the goddess in toga and sandals, walking and reading with a placid goose by her side.

Soon after the second shop opened, I met Beauman there and she was sitting neatly by a small wooden table waiting for a new customer to pick out any one of the 78 Persephones on the shelves. And when this does happen, Beauman or Sophie de Brant, the shop manager, are able to tell them the history of the author, the plot, the characters and the relevance of the book to its own era and for today. They watch over these silver grey babies and, as Beauman says, it’s a possessive, protective thing and, I would suggest, not a feeling you get in Waterstone’s just up the road.

www.persephonebooks.co.uk