Dames Yahtzee: Persephone Books
A Tribute to One of Our Favorite Small Businesses
Greetings, Dames Nation!
Today, you’re going to hear from all three of Us Your Dames about a small business we adore: Persephone Books. Based in the British city of Bath, Persephone Books is publisher and bookstore that specializes in republishing books by 20th century women that, though often quite popular and acclaimed in their time, have since fallen out of print and been forgotten.
Both Dames Margaret and Sophie were lucky enough to visit Persephone Books in person this year and it got all three of us thinking about how much we admire their work. Sharing this love with you was the obvious next step.
Persephone Books: Dame Margaret’s Primer
The titles Persephone selects to republish run the gamut of genre and type, but while similar projects, like The New York Review of Books Classics series, can prize obscurity and inscrutability, Persephone Books’ selections are often giddily readable. Describing one recently published title, Persephone referenced their friend Eva Ibbotson’s assertion that she wrote books for “highly intelligent women who have the flu” (a great description of Eva Ibbotsen’s romance novels, which both Dame M. and Persephone Books endorse quite ardently). Moreover, “a great book for highly intelligent women who have the flu” is certainly an apt description of Winnifred Watson’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, the novel that first introduced me to Persephone Books.
I first encountered Miss Guinevere Pettigrew not through Watson’s novel, but through the exquisite 2008 film adaptation of said novel starring Frances McDormand, Amy Adams, Lee Pace, Shirley Henderson, and Ciarán Hinds— a stacked cast if ever there was one.
Miss Pettigrew is a timid, middle-aged woman on her last dime desperately trying to get a job as a governess in 1930s London— despite the fact that, due to her aforementioned timidity, she is miserable disaster at managing both children and their demanding mothers. The novel opens with her arriving to interview at the very last open position her employment agency can offer, only instead of the intimidating mother she expects to encounter, the door is opened by Miss Delysia LaFosse, an impossibly glamorous, delightfully dizzy, and profoundly sweet West End starlet expecting a ladies maid. A cavalcade of comic misadventures ensue from here and, whether on film, on page, through the Frances McDormand-narrated audiobook, or through all three, you will find a glorious escape.
This has been my feeling about every visit to Persephone Books and each of their paperbacks I’ve read. From their elegant dove grey dust covers to their distinctive and carefully-chosen endpaper, these books are the essence of a Little Treat. Due to international shipping costs, Persephone’s physical merchandise can be expensive to obtain in the U.S., but many of their books are available as both e-books and a few as audiobooks, each as accessible in these formats as anything from a major publisher. We hope you enjoy learning more about the company’s work and investigate their wares for yourselves!
Dame Sophie Pursues Serendipity For A Day
Persephone Books was one of exactly two places I wanted to make certain to visit in Bath; everything else was negotiable and could be played by ear, which is exactly what my husband & I needed in a sweet little interlude between dropping Seb off at their university, and then flying back home.
I was feeling a whole bunch of ungovernable feelings at the time; leaving my child at a lovely school they very much wanted to attend, and then flying 3000 miles away from them felt all wrong, even as it was a source of real pride and joy in Seb’s gutsy, intrepid choice. I journaled my way through that trip as a way to make sure I remembered details time would burnish away and as a bulwark against spending the entire trip in miserable tears.
All of it was extremely significant to me, and totally unimportant in the scheme of anything outside of my family, one of my favorite types of story. A Day/Month/Year In The Life of some historically insignificant person, whose life nonetheless has a ton of intrinsic value and meaning worthy of delving into? Don’t mind if I do. A comedy of manners, or a story that often yields a complaint of “nothing even happens!” Those are all my joy. I asked for and got exactly all of these when I visited the shop.
As I wrote in my journal on the day, it felt like an almost mystical experience. The sunlight streaming in the window and dappling the shelves and the rug in the middle of the shop floor. (The light that week was so magnificent – the angle of the sun hitting all of the yellow limestone made it feel as though every moment was Magic Hour.) The expertise and warmth of the women who work at the shop – their workspace is separated from the retail space by a waist-high partition, making it very easy for one bookseller to call on a colleague for assistance, all contributing to a sort of clubhouse feel.
The staff know their inventory so well, and unsurprisingly, they’re very skilled readers’ advisors, wisely suggesting Reuben Sachs, by Amy Levy (CW for the author’s death by suicide); High Wages, by Dorothy Whipple; and The Fortnight in September, by RC Sherriff. Reuben Sachs has blown my mind a little bit. I wouldn’t say I’m particularly well-read in late-Victorian British Jewish writers, but I’d never even heard of its author, Amy Levy. It examines and critiques – sometimes with the deep affection of a vexed insider, sometimes spitefully – the lives and times of mostly well-off, insular London Jews. It’s funny and catty, rueful and angry, vivid throughout, and is a tragedy with some quality laughs built in. I look forward to rereading it this winter.
I left with my purchases in the classic Persephone Tote, which is such a cliché, but so worth it! It’s pretty, it’s functional, it’s very thoughtfully designed (The gusset! The interior pockets that are big enough to hold things beyond keys! The beautiful lining!), and it’s basically been my purse since we got home.
My little pilgrimage to Persephone Books, like our entire visit to Bath, was healing. That day, I got a little bit lost took an unintentionally meandering route back to our hotel and found myself in front of Westgate Buildings! If you know, you know, and if you don’t, in Persuasion, Westgate Buildings is where beloved protagonist Anne Elliott visits her former school friend, who Anne’s snobby father mocks as being far too beneath Anne’s notice socially. Serendipity! We also went to the Thermae Bath Spa (my other must-go destination); it was possibly the best touristy money I’ve ever spent.
Dame Karen’s Persephone Two: Edwardian Social Work and World War II Adultery
I own three Persephone Books, one procured in London in 2019 before the shop moved to Bath and two from Boston’s beautiful Beacon Hill Books & Cafe, which has an entire Persephone section. I’ve read two of them, and they are very different and (I think) a good overview of the Persephone oeuvre. The third is High Wages by Dorothy Whipple, which I see Sophie picked up during her recent visit! Maybe we’ll do a High Wages issue. High Wages was one of the first three books Persephone published, and I have to wonder if their interest was piqued in part because of Virago Books’ rejecting books using the metric “below the Whipple line,” per founder Carmen Callil [RIP] in a 2006 interview with The Guardian: “Dorothy Whipple was a popular novelist of the 1930s and 1940s whose prose and content absolutely defeated us. A considerable body of women novelists, who wrote like the very devil, bit the Virago dust when Alexandra, Lynn and I exchanged books and reports, on which I would scrawl a brief rejection: “Below the Whipple line.”” Bless Persephone getting into the Virago dust!
The one I grabbed in London is Round About A Pound A Week by Maud Pember Reeves. I must admit, I grabbed this one out of a sense of panic; I had been in the store for quite some time, was jet-lagged and hungry, and was having a very hard time deciding which book to buy. The famous Persephone end papers and matching bookmark are a 1912 sampler (I love samplers) made, as most samplers are, by someone unknown beyond her initials, D.A.R. The book is nonfiction, which also appealed to me--it’s the result of “a group of women, all of them members of the feminist, left-wing Fabian Women's Group, [who] would regularly leave their comfortable homes in Kensington and Hampstead and call on forty-two families in Lambeth in order to interview them about their everyday life.” I don’t love the parachute journalism/social work situation, but these sorts of good will projects were one way in which poor people’s lives made their way into literature and history, and so here I am, feeling weird about buying an expensive and luxuriously designed book purchased during a trip to London as a tourist…about the lives of poor Londoners circa 1909-1913 as observed by members of what their website calls “Britain’s oldest political think tank.”
Still, as the introduction by Polly Toynbee reads, “This is a book written by a Fabian socialist addressed to a middle class world of power and condescension, reporting back to them how wrong they were in their comfortable assumptions that these families are ‘bad managers’, who with a bit more home economics advice from their superiors should be able to feed and clothe their children far better on their sparse incomes.” Important work! Work that is ongoing, infuriating, and a constant source of book club material (Nickel and Dimed! Maid! Nomadland!)
The slice-of-life observations and descriptions make for pleasurable reading. For instance:
“Mrs. P is under thirty and, when she has the time to look it, rather pretty. Her eldest child is only ten. The tightest economy reigns in that little house, partly because Mr P is a careful man and very delicate, and partly because Mrs. P is terrified of debt. It was she who discovered the plan of buying seven cracked eggs for 3d. As she said, it might lose you a little of the egg, but you could smell it first, which was a convenience.”
I would absolutely read a novel with this opening paragraph, and this book is full of such passages.
At the opposite end of the reading spectrum, we have To Bed With Grand Music by Marghanita Laski, which may well have been the All Fours of its day?! (I haven’t read All Fours but lots of people I know are losing their minds over it, some joyfully, some angrily, and are mildly scandalized by, so I’m ignorantly going with this extremely possible misconception of mine.) Dubbed “a surprisingly racy novel about sex in wartime,” it’s the tale of Deborah, whose husband goes off to fight in World War II. Rather than keeping the home fires going, she moves into London from the suburbs, leaving her small child with her mother, ostensibly to get a job and make herself useful. However, she moves in with a hard-partying acquaintance and almost immediately starts a whirlwind program of adultery and shopping for expensive hats, all the while hilariously making all sorts of justifications for her behavior. We get to know Deborah and her mindset before she even leaves for London, thanks to Laski’s satirical side-eye prose:
On Christmas Eve she took Timmy to the carol service in the village church. He was really too young for it, but Deborah was determined to wallow through Christmas in an orgy of sentimentality. As she stood him on the seat beside her and encouraged him to pipe such words as he knew, she wished fiercely that he should remember irrevocably this scene and its emotions, his mother’s lovely face in her little fur bonnet, the blue-painted ceiling, the choristers’ voices, the deeply pervading sadness of Christmas in wartime.
I love a slightly delusional, unreliable narrator, and I love this book!
Thank you for reading this week! We’ll be back again soon, but in the meantime please enjoy:
The perfection of ’s phrase “some very smart people and Maureen Dowd” in the context of her essay on Wicked and cultural criticism
And this classic video of Patti LaBelle attempting to perform “This Christmas” with neither backup singers nor effective cue cards at the 1996 Christmas tree lighting on the National Mall:
I LOVE Persephone titles. I hope to visit the store one day. My personal favorite is Dorothy Whipple. Also their book/paper quality is really amazing and they endure the test of time. I really enjoyed Miss Pettigrew as well
Dame Sophie, I felt that way when I went to Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, where they filmed Some Like It Hot. It was an out of body experience.