Persephone

Persephone Book Group

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And I am now back from my first ever Persephone Book Group! I do hope it’s the first of many, because the people were lovely, the discussion was fun, and meeting Persephone fans new or old is always a delight. I *am* a little worried that my Persephone obsession was a little too forthright… will have to temper my “Oo! Oo! I know that one!” for next time…

We discussed Flush by Virginia Woolf, which I read a few years ago and re-read last week. It’s all about Elizabeth Barrett and her courtship with Robert Browning, from the perspective of their dog Flush. I think it’s a brilliant book – mostly because it so successfully presents a new angle, a new way of perceiving things. Lots on smell especially – I liked this, on Flush’s astonishment that Mr. Barrett cannot tell Mr. Browning has been there:

‘Don’t you know,’ Flush marvelled, ‘who’s been sitting in that chair? Can’t you smell him?’ For to Flush the whole room still reeked of Mr. Browning’s presence. The air dashed past the bookcase, and eddied and curled round the heads of the five pale busts. But the heavy man sat by his daughter in entire self-absorption. He noticed nothing. He suspected nothing. Aghast at his obtuseness, Flush slipped past him out of the room.’

Critics haven’t always been enamoured by the novel, perhaps because the initial concept sounds a trifle silly. But in Woolf’s very able hands this is a clever, funny and very well observed book. I almost never get bothered about depictions of places in novels, but from the entirely new angle of a dog, I found descriptions of London and Italy fascinating.

The book group seemed, on the whole, to like the book a lot. Most of us didn’t know much about Elizabeth Barrett Browning before we started, but didn’t think that made much of a difference. Woolf’s slightly odd views on class were discussed, but so too her liveliness and breaking free from Victorianism. Whilst I love Flush, I don’t think it’s the most representative of Persephone’s books, and I’d be intrigued to see what the views are on other titles. Next time is Joanna Canaan’s Princes In The Land, and after that Rachel Ferguson’s Alas, Poor Lady. I’ve not read either of them, and sadly I’m going to miss the next one, but looking forward to July and Alas, Poor Lady.

If anybody from the book group is dropping in (since I shamelessly advertised this blog) please do say hello! I look forward to seeing you again.

Cheerful Weather For The Wedding

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I finished Julia Strachey’s Cheerful Weather For The Wedding the other day – I’m reading short books in snatches while writing my dissertation, and this is one of the Persephone Books is one I’ve meaning to read for a while. Elaine at Random Jottings gave it to me many moons ago, but somehow it’s only just worked its way to the top of the pile.

Well, I’m very glad Elaine could spare it, as I loved every second! This short novel (120pp) all takes place on the wedding day of Dolly and Owen. And it’s very, very funny. There is a semi-serious romance storyline through the centre of it (should Dolly be marrying Owen? Will they actually get married?) but it is the host of secondary characters which make this novel (or perhaps novella?) so amusing. My favourites are brothers Robert and Tom – the latter spends the entire novel trying to persuade the former to change his emerald-coloured socks: “Robert, your mother would desire you to go upstairs instantly to take off those bounder’s socks, Robert, and to change into a respectable pair. Will you go, Robert?” He is distraught lest their schoolfellows – ‘men from Rugby’ – be at the wedding and witness this calamatous social faux pas. Robert’s iterated response is “Go and put your head in a bag.” I kept hoping these two would crop up, even though they essentially said the same thing every time they appeared, it was done so amusingly and accurately that I could have read pages of Tom’s serious monotone and Robert’s complete lack of care.

And then there’s dotty Nellie-from-the-village, one of the ‘help’:

“The gentleman that come to see about the hot pipes out in the lobby, said to me, ‘ have two of my own,’ he said, ‘what are both of them big strapping great boys by now. And oh… good golly! – what devils and demons they do be!’ he said. ‘Well,’ I said to him, ‘my son Teddy is exactly the very same thing over again,’ I said. ‘All the time this cigarette-smoking, they pointed boots, and all of it, why, devils and demons isn’t in it with such as they are,’ I said. No. Very decidedly not!”

The whole family, and especially servants, are very funny characters – slightly ridiculous, but not too exaggerated as to not ring true. I suppose that’s why the humour is so good – rooted in the actual. Sort of a less-hyperbolic PG Wodehouse, perhaps. Crossed with Virginia Woolf.

According to IMDB there is a film of Cheerful Weather For The Wedding due in 2010. The only information about it at the moment is that Sinead Cusack is attached – I suppose she’ll play Mrs. Thatcham. I’m not sure the novel will make a good film, actually – sometimes lines which are great written down lose everything when spoken. Still, I’ll keep an open mind until I see it, which I undoubtedly will.

If you’re wavering on Cheerful Weather For The Wedding, I encourage you to give it a go (though this comes with a warning that not everyone agrees with me: see this review by Vintage Reads) – it’s recently been released in the beautiful Persephone Classics edition (pictured) which should make it more easily available… and I might just have to get myself a copy of that one too. I think it’s entered my Top Five Persephones, and since I’ve read all or part of over thirty, that’s not bad at all.

Making Conversation

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Persephone Books very kindly sent me a copy of Making Conversation by Christine Longford to review, and I actually read it a month or two ago, but was waiting for it to be available on the website before putting down my thoughts here. And, of course, that means I’ll have to search back into the depths of my memory…

The novel follows Martha from childhood through school and into Oxford University. She is an awkward girl, and, as the Persephone website says, ‘her besetting trouble is that she talks either too much, or too little: she can never get the right balance of conversation.’ This is evident from the opening pages, where she marvels at the inexpensive price of the brooch given to Ellen, the cook-general. (“You little idiot.. Now she won’t think anything of it. People like that don’t, if you tell them the price.”) Very intelligent but equally detached, she seems to meander through school and interaction with ‘paying guests’ at home (very definitely not a hotel) – where her mother advertises as an ‘Officer’s wife’: ‘This was mostly true. The military connexion grew fainter with the years. It was some time since Major Freke had written too many cheques, and disappeared.’ Martha isn’t quite precocious, but her indifferent responses at school and habit of repeating what she doesn’t understand (“Miss Spencer pulled my hair, and said I had committed adultery”) might give that impression.

Time passes, and Martha becomes a student at Oxford University. This was the part of the novel I enjoyed most, reflecting on the ways in which things have changed. Not least, apparently, the propensity to send people down all the time, and the illicit parties at men’s colleges offer a glimpse of the past. By the time Martha gets to university, her personality seems to have completely altered – which is probably true to life, but a little off-putting in what is tantamount to a Bildungsroman. She is pretty outgoing, even vivacious; jokey, flirty and chatty.

The new introduction by Rachel Billington compares the novel to Cold Comfort Farm, at least in terms of being a classic of English humour. Well… I don’t quite agree. Making Conversation is an excellent portrait of a character not often depicted sympathetically in the early twentieth century – the female academic, the intelligent but quiet girl – but isn’t ever laugh-out-loud funny. Lots of diverting sections, and a certain amount of amusing turns of phrase (for example the quotation below) but I don’t think Longford’s priority is hyperbolic comedy, as Gibbons’ was.

‘She would renounce all the lusts of the flesh. It would save a lot of trouble, and as she wasn’t a success on the carnal side, she might as well give it up. In that case, there would be no need to marry and have a family; and she could become famous as a Homeric scholar.’



And, as always, the presentation of the book is perfect. We know what to expect from the outside, but the endpaper (yes, Col, I’m going to talk about the endpaper) is one of my favourites from Persephone yet, apparently from a 1931 dress silk.

In conclusion – another welcome inclusion in the Persephone canon, and with invaluable, and quietly amusing, insights into another aspect of a disappeared world.

Someone at a Distance

StuckinaBook All , , 8 Comments

Continuing the week of Persephone Birthday celebrations here at S-i-a-B (and do keep telling us in the previous post about your favourite Persephones and how you found out about them, and put your request in for a chance to win a Persephone book of your choice) – I don’t think I’ve ever talked about one of my favourite Persephone books. Appropriately enough it was one of the first three to be published, so it’s now ten years since it came back into print.


Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple was Whipple’s last novel, published in 1953 and received no reviews at all. For a once bestselling novelist, this was quite a blow – and, what’s worse, it was a wholly undeserved silence. I’ve only read four of Whipple’s books – SaaD, They Knew Mr. Knight, Greenbanks, The Closed Door and other stories, all except Greenbanks published by Persephone – but Someone at a Distance is the best of those. A lot of people agree that it’s her best novel, and it should have been treated with fanfares and red carpets.

The plot appears, on the surface, to be conventional. A contentedly married couple, Ellen and Avery, are disrupted when a French companion arrives and runs off with Avery. The narrative moves back and forth across the channel, looking at the dignified devestation of Ellen and the homeland and family of Louise, the French interloper. What starts as a not unusual trio is given enormous depth and believable emotion when we investigate why Louise acts as she does; witness Avery’s confusion and attempts to organise his life and mistakes; Ellen’s need to look after her two children as well as retain her dignity and integrity. And all the time the reader is asking him/herself – who is the ‘someone at a distance’? Whipple sometimes creates some great titles that make you think all the way through the novel, and while I have set views on which character the ‘someone’ is, others disagree.

I’m a big believer in judging books on their writing, rather than plot – and Whipple is a prose writer par excellence. Not showy or grandiose, but both moving and compulsive – Someone at a Distance is a fairly long book, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you read it in one or two sittings. Dorothy Whipple may well be the great undiscovered English novelist – certainly Someone at a Distance is an excellently constructed, sophisticated and emotionally taut novel which should never have been allowed to go out of print.

As well as being one of the first three Persephone Books titles published, Someone at a Distance was one of the first Persephone Classics, and treated to a wider publication and beautiful cover. I love the uniformity of ther Persephone library, but I also think this Persephone Classics cover is the most beautiful cover I’ve ever seen. And so I had to own both…

I’m sure lots of people here have read Someone at a Distance – thoughts? Who do you think the ‘someone’ is? If you’ve not read it, I really encourage you to give Dorothy Whipple a try.

Miss Buncle’s Book

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One of the books I got for my birthday was a new Persephone – Miss Buncle’s Book by D. E. Stevenson. My lovely friend Lucy, who knows more about modern fiction than anyone else I know, gave it to me – so thank you Lucy! D. E. Stevenson is one of those authors whose name has been at the back of my mind, and on my shelves, for years – but never made it to actual reading. I have two or three already, but have been on the lookout for Miss Buncle’s Book for quite a while, as it is reportedly Stevenson’s best. The folks at Persephone Books obviously agree, and have made this hard-to-find title a lot easier to find. The premise is difficult to dislike – Barbara Buncle, a quiet, amiable lady in a quiet, amiable village decides to write a novel, and features all her neighbours in it under thinly disguised names. Luckily for her all the villagers seem to have surnames which are adjectives or nouns (Bold, King, Pretty) or with obvious associations (Fortnum/Mason; Dick/Turpin) and this all adds to the fun. The village all read the novel, and are scandalised at the accurate (and thus not always flattering) depiction of themselves – and are determined to root out the identity of ‘John Smith’, the alias Miss Buncle chose for herself.

A rather wonderful idea for a novel, which somehow doesn’t get too complicated, Miss Buncle’s Book would have been even better in the hands of Angela Thirkell, and a literary classic if E. M. Delafield had penned it. As it is, D. E. Stevenson’s writing isn’t quite as good as her ideas – a lot of cliches and unoriginal turns of phrase which prevent the novel from being in a higher league. Don’t misunderstand me, this is better than a lot of writing out there, but Persephone so often publish those whose writing is exceptional (perhaps my recent immersing in Katherine Mansfield has spoilt me for lesser writers, which is most of ’em) that I didn’t expect to have to be on cliche-watch.

Having said all that, Miss Buncle’s Book is still a delight. The characters are fun and the situation very amusing. She handles it all with liveliness and a healthy dollop of whimsy, and I would certainly recommend the novel wholeheartedly – it just doesn’t quite become the classic it could have been.

Dorothy Whipple, how I do love thee

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Though I now space them out, a new Persephone Books read is always a wonderful treat, and something to be treasured. When I first found out about this publishing company, through their publishing of Richmal Crompton’s Family Roundabout, I went on a bit of a rampage, and read lots. Though they cover quite a range of decades, genres, authors, forms – and, yes, some of the writers are even male! – there is something unmistakably Persephone about everything they issue, and thus something unmistakably great. The Closed Door and Other Stories, one of the latest batch of three, was no different. Nicola Beauman, who runs Persephone Books, very kindly sent me this to review when I made ingratiating noises in her direction – and, of course, I loved it.

Most aficiandos of Persephone agree that Dorothy Whipple is one of their major finds. Crompton and EM Delafield were already firm favourites with me, and I was delighted to see them come back into the light of day, but it is Whipple who has been the nicest new face. Though decidedly a domestic-fiction-writer, she demonstrates that this need not mean anything derogatory about writing style. Nicola Beauman has had to fiercely defend Whipple against some critiques over the past few years, mostly from people who, bewilderingly, have been against niche publishing in any shape or form – but just pick up Someone at a Distance or They Knew Mr. Knight and it is indisputable that Whipple needed bringing back into print.

The Closed Door and Other Stories is different from any other Whipple I’ve read, not least because it’s short stories rather than full-length prose. The first story, ‘The Closed Door’, is easily the longest – 75 or so pages – and the other eight are snapshots of characters’ lives. I read them all together at a fast pace, which probably isn’t the ideal way to approach short stories, and I must confess I found a lot of them to be quite similar – a daughter (always a daughter) is repressed by her selfish parents who expect her to act like a servant, and dismiss any academic or romantic ambitions the daughter has. I like that Whipple doesn’t aggrandise either of these ambitions over the other, but sees both as valid modes of self-expression and fulfilment. Anyway, as you read more of the stories in the collection this scenario becomes very familiar – but each story presents a different ending/solution/irresolution. ‘After Tea’ is an especially nice contrast. When presented together, the particular culminations grow even more significant, playing off against each other, and become less ‘closing’, as it were – more problematic, occasionally more triumphant.

Against the stories which fall into this mould, a couple stand out as really beautiful evocations of character and predicament – ‘The Rose’ and ‘Wednesday’ particularly. The latter is quite a brave portrait – a divorcee adulteress (though one coerced into it by her husband, we are led to understand) on one of her monthly permitted visits to her children. Agonising and realistic and a painful gem.

In case you hadn’t ascertained this yet – The Closed Door is a book definitely worth buying! Just spread the stories out a bit.