A Woman of Substance

FANFAIR

PERSEPHONE BOOKS' FEMININE MYSTIQUE

ersephone, the British imprint founded by Nicola Beauman, evokes cozy and nostalgic memories of London train rides, Yardley English Lavender, freshly brewed tea being poured into a proper china cup, a spring popping out of a slightly doggysmelling armchair. The tiny catalogue’s 86 titles are a compendium of short stories, memoirs, cookbooks, and republished works by neglected female writers from the interwar years. Authors such as Dorothy Whipple, Marghanita Laski, Winifred Watson (whose book Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day was made into the 2008 film), and Mollie Panter-Downes, the London wartime (and peacetime) correspondent of The New Yorker, tell stories of gentle, respectable domesticity, of outward seemliness and inner turmoil which, through the banal minutiae of a housewife’s day, unravel to show life exquisitely and often darkly revealed. “These are books where nothing and everything happens at the same time,” offers Beauman, a Cambridge-educated mother of five. “They are an acknowledgment that the small-scale should never be overlooked.” Frustrated by being able to find her favorite authors only in secondhand-book shops, Beauman, herself an author and a passionate champion of “the middlebrow,” opened Persephone in 1999 in a shabbily genteel former grocery store on London’s Lamb’s Conduit Street.

Eleven years later, the imprint, with its uniform dove-gray book jackets and beautiful endpapers, lovingly handpicked by Beauman and her staff, has developed a cult following. For example, the endpaper for Doreen, a 1946 tale by Barbara Noble about a child evacuee torn from her mother, was taken from a 1940 “London Alert” print silk scarf belonging to a Persephone reader. For Dorothy Whipple’s Die Closed Door and Other Stories, Beauman chose a design from a 1930s tea gown she’d found at Camden Passage Market.

“Allergic to the corporate” and admittedly “short” with people who tell her she ought to expand the business into wallpaper and greeting cards, Beauman nonetheless dreams of the day when all those British-costume-drama producers will leave Jane Austen alone, stop trying to do the definitive Sense and Sensibility, and instead look to Dorothy Whipple for inspiration. Tea gowns instead of bonnets? Oh heppy, heppy day. (persephonebooks.co.uk)

CHRISTA D’SOUZA