This summer we discovered an amazing publishing house cum book shop in Londons Lambs Conduit Street.
Persephone Books prints “mainly neglected fiction and non-fiction by women, for women and about women”.
Nicola Beauman, who founded and still runs the company, comes from a writing and publishing background. She founded Persephone after her first book, A Very Great Profession: The Women’s Novel 1914-39, was published by Virago in 1983. “I realised that there were lots and lots of books that no one else wanted to re-print,”
Authors include Monica Dickens, Dorothy Whipple, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Winifred Watson who wrote Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day, recentley released as a feature film.
Each book has an elegant dove-grey cover and its own distinctive endpaper with matching bookmark taken from a fabric issued in the year the book was originally printed.
Here at the Womens room we have wept with sadness, frustration and joy at title No 7: The Home-Maker, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher.
Been transported into the fairytale glamorous world of Miss LaFosse and Miss Pettigrew in 1930’s London in Title No: 21: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, by Winifred Watson
And given our favourite friends, title no 12: a book of poems about marraige and motherhood,
It’s Hard to Be Hip Over Thirty, by Judith Viorst.
Lambs Conduit Street is set in the heart of Bloomsbury and has a charming village feel. Visiting Persephone is like stepping into a bookshop in Ross on Wye in 1935 and well worth a visit.
You can also order all the books from their website and sign up for their free magazine.
Enjoy!
Persephone Books
59 Lamb’s Conduit Street, WC1N
