Prefaces

Extract from the Persephone Afterword to The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett (Afterword by Gretchen Gerzina)

After she achieved an early fame, the money she used was less to support the family that to support a style of life she desired: beautiful clothes (she put off the date of her wedding several times because her dress hadn’t arrived from Europe), furnishings, and houses. In more ways than one she was trying to return to a romanticised notion of an English childhood, even though she had yet to write about children.

It was no mistake that nearly all of her stories and books would have to do with a reversal of fortune theme and a shift in class status. Throughout her life Frances was known for four things: her unrelenting literary production, which often drove her to illness; her love of beautiful clothes and domestic surroundings; her inability to remain settled in an one place or even one country; and her wonderful gardens. To these traits a modern biographer would add several others: a fierce independence, often maintained at the expense of other relationships; a tendency to romanticise herself and her life; a near-obsession in her life and work with border-crossings of all kinds; and transformation through self-determination and nature. Although known best today for her children’s books, she began as a frank observer of domestic discord and even violence, seduction and abandonment. Her characters are not often happily married, a reflection of her two failed marriages.

 

Extract from the Persephone Afterword to Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski  (Afterword by Anne Sebba)

…. even before the war she [Marghanita Laski] had had an intense personal involvement in the crisis of continental Europe. She had been at Oxford and, although not actively political, had made friends with many intellectuals. Her family was Jewish and had rescued two Jewish refugees, a boy and a girl, shortly before the outbreak of war; Marghanita was already living away from home at this time, but it was she who met the boy from a London station when he first arrived in this country, and heard him sing ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ – the only words of English he had been taught by his mother, who was later killed. His plight cannot have been absent from her thoughts when she was writing Little Boy Lost ; which is partly why little Jean ‘walks straight into the reader’s heart. He is, in one sense, every lost child of Europe,’ as the novelist Elizabeth Bowen wrote in her review.

In the novel Marghanita Laski used France as one of many countries where the war brought society to a state of collapse … The image of a deeply divided post-war France, still prostrate from its brutal invasion, is brilliantly and chillingly evoked in Little Boy Lost. Its dramatic capitulation in 140, leading to the end of the Third Republic and the creation of a collaborationist regime in Vichy, is something with which it is still coming to terms even today, for the humiliations that were endured cut deep and long into the national psyche. Laski’s sharp intelligence foretold how difficult the process of restoring French pride would be; yet she remained an optimist.

Extract from the Persephone Preface to The Children Who Lived in a Barn by Eleanor Graham (Preface by Jacqueline Wilson)

… In the first five pages Granny gets taken ill abroad, Daddy decides he and Mother will fly out to her, the children are told they must manage by themselves – and then they’re left, just like that.

Nobody seems to find this particularly odd within the story. I didn’t when I was a child. People look back nostalgically to family life in the fifties. Back in those days when Mothers weren’t single and Daddies ruled the roost we think children were so well cared for and cosseted. We see clips on television of little girls in smocked dresses and sandals and boys with severe haircuts and funny shorts and feel they were looked after all the day long and then tucked up under their eiderdowns safe and sound at night. Children were kept children in those days. No designer clothes, no chatrooms, no mobiles, no sleaze in the soaps, no scary videos.

We didn’t watch anything scary on the television – but life itself could be a bit of an adventure. Like most of the children in my Primary School, I wore a latchkey on a piece of string under my school blouse. From the age of seven I walked the half hour journey home by myself, crossing several streets, and then let myself in to the empty flat and amused myself for a couple of hours until Mum came home from work. I wasn’t allowed to make a cup of tea in case I scalded myself, but I could fix myself a quick jam sandwich snack. During the holidays I spent delicious long days playing elaborate imaginary games in the privacy of the empty flat, or I went out to play with other children in the nearest bomb site. Sometimes we took a picnic and roamed all over Richmond Park.

We weren’t deprived or neglected slum children. We came from perfectly respectable and often loving families. If we weren’t back by bedtime our Mums would start calling us. No-one was allowed to stay out at night – but daytime was playtime.

Extract from the Publisher’s Note to Brook Evans by Susan Glaspell

A novel about love, it is constructed like a play or a symphony in three acts or movements, the first set in 1888, the second in 1907 and the third (and the coda) in 1928. Thematically it is similar to Fidelity, in that it is about a young girl wanting to be true to herself and her love but thereby finding herself at odds with social convention; again it asks the question – should she put love first? But this time Susan Glaspell gives a slightly different answer.

She was familiar with the avant-garde thinking of her time and was deeply interested in Nietzsche’s ideas about a radical change in moral values – ideas also adopted by D.H.Lawrence, whose Lady Chatterley’s Lover was written at the same time as Brook Evans and published in the same month.

Extract from the Persephone Preface to The Montana Stories by Katherine Mansfield  (Preface by the Publisher)

For several reasons publishing her work as ‘the Montana stories’ is unlikely to have been how Katherine Mansfield herself would have wanted it to be read. Few short story writers arrange their work chronologically, preferring to intersperse moods and themes…. Nor would Katherine have wanted fragments included – yet these unfinished pages can give as much insight into her mind as a fully completed and polished story (rather as a block of stone left unfinished by a sculptor can convey something of what he might have achieved)….

…. this method of setting out Katherine Mansfield’s work gives a true and touching insight into her mind, especially when accompanied by the extracts from her letters and journal reprinted at the end of this volume. She berates herself often for her laziness and is critical of what she writes; yet she produced some of the greatest literature of the twentieth century and her output was large – these stories total about 80,000 words, the length of a novel, a great achievement for someone feverish and in pain. Overall, Katherine Mansfield might have liked the human, frightened, heartfelt person who emerges from the letters, from the journal – and from the stories themselves.

Extract from the Persephone Preface to Family Roundabout by Richmal Crompton (Preface by Juliet Aykroyd)

Overall the novel is more somber than its predecessors, as if tinged by the austerity and isolation of England during the war years, the need for reticence, the battening-down on spontaneity. It may also be coloured by personal memories. Crompton’s mother, Clara Lamburn, died in1939, the year in which Family Roundabout ends. She lived with Richmal as companion, housekeeper, proof-reader and business manager for 22 years.  In 1923 she nursed her 33- year-old daughter through an attack of polio which left her partially disabled; later both women suffered from breast cancer. Clara was a powerful person: self-confident, extrovert, a founder of the Bromley Common W.I., and a great maker of jam. She held court every Saturday at Medhursts’s in Bromley, and expected all her family to attend, exactly as Mrs Willoughby demands that her family turn up at Crofton’s in Bellington. Her grand-daughter Margaret Disher described her as ‘majestic, beautiful, kind and sympathetic’ though ‘not exactly cuddly …’ Her nurturing may well have been on the overwhelming side. At the risk of descending to what Dorothy L. Sayers dismissed as ‘a slovenly sub-department of morbid psychology’, one might hazard a guess that the two Family Roundabout matriarchs are a composite representation of Clara, and reflect some at least of her daughter’s retrospective filial feelings.

Extract from the Persephone Preface to Consider the Years by Virginia Graham (Preface by Anne Harvey)

The republication of Consider the Years, Virginia Graham’s only poetry collection,  a welcome choice and one which links her with other women whose writing, published in the 1940s or thereabouts, is now available again for new readers. Among them are Frances Bellerby, Anne Ridler, E.J.Scovell, Molly Holden, Phoebe Hesketh, Ruth Pitter and Frances Cornford. If Virginia Graham has been more neglected than any of them it will be because publishers often tread a narrow path, and might have qualms where light verse, so much of its period, is concerned. Is it still funny? Has it dated? Might it appear class-conscious? Will it stand up against more serious, academic writing?

She has been likened to the American humorist, Ogden Nash, but is far closer to John Betjeman, having a similar gift for emphasising places, brand-names and types, wittily concealing herself beneath the skin of an instantly recognisable character or casting a jaundiced eye over a situation. She has the same expertise in handling gentle – or not so gentle – sarcasm, the put-down, the aside, the tongue-in-cheek, the serious poem with the jokey punch-line, the funny one with the twist in its tale.

Extract from the Persephone Preface to Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy (Preface by Julia Neuberger)

….. Finally she wrote Reuben Sachs, which most people regard as her best work.  Yet the book caused a stir in the very Jewish community to which she was becoming closer,,,, even as she remained someone who had her reservations about her own people; indeed she had confessed to finding anti-Semitism justifiable after observing the German Jews of Dresden in a synagogue … reading that nowadays,  in a letter to her sister Katie, we cannot fail to be shocked and amazed; however, unless we understand the fragility of the social position of middle-class Jews in London in the nineteenth century, we will not be able to understand Reuben Sachs.  In addition, the novel msut also be seen as in some senses a riposte to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, which had been published in 1876 when Amy Levy was fifteen….

…. This is a novel about women, and Jewish women, about public life, about families, and Jewish families, about snobbishness, and Jewish snobbishness. One of the most important reasons for its success is that Amy Levy wrote it in a direct style that never wasted a word; this was something remarked on by Oscar Wilde when he wrote just after her death, in the September 1889 edition of A Woman’s World (which he edited and to which she had contributed):   “It’s directness, its uncompromising truths, its depth of feeling, and, above all, its absence of any single superfluous word, make it in some sort a classic. Like all her best work it is sad, but the sadness is by no means morbid. The strong undertone of moral earnestness, never preached, gives a stability and force to the vivid portraiture, and   prevents the satiric touches from degenerating into mere malice. Truly the book is an achievement.”

Extract from the Persephone Preface to Miss Pettigrew Lies for a Day by Winifred Watson (Preface by Henrietta Twycross-Martin)

Although [her] six novels form two distinct groups, three north-country novels set in the previous century and three with contemporary settings, what stands put when reading them in sequence is how different they are: rustic novels, a historical novel, a comic fantasy, a ‘poor girl makes good’ and a war-time murder with family complexities. Yet they all share themes and are typical of ‘women’s novels’ of the period in that they focus upon women’s lives, and on difficulties overcome and trials surmounted before the inevitable happy ending is reached.

When we met earlier this year Winifred Watson said firmly that women read women’s novels and men read men’s novels, which was perhaps truer when she was writing than now.  Her novels are plot-driven: she knew exactly what was going to happen before she put pen to paper.

…. The common theme running through these novels is women having second chances, adapting to change, moving on, just as Winifred Watson herself experimented with different genres: changing direction was characteristic of her as a writer.

Extract from the Persephone Afterword to A Woman’s Place by Ruth Adam (Afterword by Yvonne Roberts)

Twenty-five years after Ruth Adam wrote her book almost each and every woman, no matter her initial optimism, will reach a point when she realises that as long as she squeezes her needs into the male mould that has prevailed for decades, equality of a sort is hers.  She is allowed to join the system – but not to change it.  And radical change is still what is desperately required.  Without it, a woman finds herself instantly handicapped by her gender when, for example, in work, she moves from being childless to becoming a mother, or when a less qualified male colleague is promoted over her head not because she has children but because she might; or when she finds herself a divorcee with a young family reliant on benefits.

In some ways, the divorce, for instances, is more pressured now than in 1975.  In the year 2000 emancipation may have freed a woman from a rotten relationship but it has also delivered her into a society in which, still, the value of caring is infinitely lower than the appreciation of productivity in the labour market.  In 1975, she would have been deemed a good mother for staying at home, however impoverished.  A quarter of a century later, in the same circumstances, she is deemed as bad because the New Labour government interprets duty as primarily the duty to enter paid work.  Yet, if she does take up employment, she opens herself to fresh criticism on a different front.  This time she will be blamed if her children’s academic standards flag – as if fathers have no culpability.  So how does she decide whom to satisfy? Traditional expectations?  Modern political demands?  Or her own instincts – no matter that this may mean life on the breadline?

Extract from the Perspehone Afterword to They Knew Mr Knight by Dorothy Whipple (Afterword by Rev. Terence Handley MacMath)

It cannot be assumed that those of today’s readers who are not familiar with the Bible and the Prayer Book will appreciate the resonances of Dorothy Whipple’s language. The irony of Mr Knight’s last business venture being entitled ‘Kosmos’, for instance, will that be lost? And if the roles of men and women, and class distinctions, are no longer so drearily prescribed, will the hopes and frustrations of her characters be so well appreciated? Is the juxtaposition of the transcendent and the mundane convincing? In sum, will a narrative which springs from a coherent religious vision still be readable in what has been called a ‘post-Christian’ society?

But people everywhere, or all religions and none, still perceive the opposition of good and evil. They still relish stories which illuminate the ordinary human condition. They are increasingly troubled by the acquisitiveness now built into our own society. And if women like Celia, Ruth and Freda have more opportunities for work and leisure outside their homes than they once did, they may still find themselves caught in the absorbing complexity of family relationships; and they are sure to enjoy a novel about women like themselves.

Extract from the Perspehone Postscript to They Knew Mr Knight by Dorothy Whipple (Postscript by Christopher Beauman)

Such men are dangerous, and they create a cord of dependency.  When things go wrong that cord is revealed, and humiliation and disaster follow.  Yet in Dorothy Whipple’s account Celia’s real humiliation occurs earlier: hers is to be trapped in a cycle of charity committees and bridge-afternoons (can she have been good at bridge?).  Her triumph follows the disaster: then, as a traditional woman, ignorant of the world outside the home, largely uninterested in its ups and downs, she can return to her caring strengths and know that at least her ability to love is no longer redundant.

Extract from the Persephone Preface to Every Eye by IsobelEnglish (Preface by Neville Braybrooke)

 

On the second page of Every Eye, Ibiza is referred to as ‘the most savage of the Balearic Islands’  and, towards the end of the novel, as the ‘White Island of Nightingales’ – a description used by many of the local people whom we met.  How savage the island was, we were made aware of on our first evening when we were sitting in the centre of Santa Eulalia del Rio and saw an American woman stoned by the villagers because she was wearing trousers: she had to take shelter in the bus in which she had travelled and wait for it to return to the capital of the Island.

On the second page of Every Eye, Ibiza is referred to as ‘the most savage of the Balearic Islands’  and, towards the end of the novel, as the ‘White Island of Nightingales’ – a description used by many of the local people whom we met.  How savage the island was, we were made aware of on our first evening when we were sitting in the centre of Santa Eulalia del Rio and saw an American woman stoned by the villagers because she was wearing trousers: she had to take shelter in the bus in which she had travelled and wait for it to return to the capital of the Island.

The novel offers contrasting views of Ibiza: there is that of the picture-book with paths leading off the page to places of serene happiness, and that of blood and sand where blue quilled cocks with sharpened beaks and pared claws fight to the death.  Victories are assessed on points – and usually only after each bird is dead.  The few tourist agents on the Island in the 1950s kept silent about this.

Extract from the Persphone Afterword to Saplings by Noel Streatfeild  (Afterword by Dr. Jeremy Holmes)

Streatfeild’s supreme gift was her ability to see the world from a child’s perspective. What makes Saplings special is her use of that skill to explore a very adult problem – the psychological impact of war and trauma on family life. Here she was and still is in tune with the zeitgeist.  In the mid 1940s psychologists, psychoanalysts and child psychiatrists were jst beginning to address the very same issues from a scientific perspective. Bowlby had just published his ground-breaking 44 Juvenile Thieves, showing how adolescent delinquency arises out of loss and separation in childhood. Maternal Care and Child Health, his influential W.H.O.-commissioned study of the impact of war on child mental health appeared only a few years later; and at the same time he was also starting to pioneer psychotherapy with whole families. Winnicot wrote and broadcasted about the inner world of the infant, and Melanie Klein and Anna Freud were developing child psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, the latter, with Dorothy Burlingham, running her nursery for orphans, most of whom were psychological casualties of war.

In the first half of the century children’s well-being was mainly equated with their physical health. Novelists, among who Dickens is the obvious example, had long been interested in the working of children’s minds, and the impact of adult neglect and cruelty upon them, but science had lagged behind. Psychoanalysis – an area about which we have no evidence that Streatfeild took the slightest interest – had established two essential themes, which nevertheless underlie the thrust of her book. First, that children’s minds were as vulnerable as their bodies to disturbance and illness, and second, and as a consequence of the first, that children are autonomous beings with their own needs and projects, and are not merely objects to be controlled and manipulated by adults, however well-meaning.

Extract from the Persphone Preface to Tell it to a Stranger by Elizabeth Berridge  (Preface by A.N.Wilson)

She is a novelist of distinction who is also – and this is a rarity – equally at home in the quite different medium of the short story, with its need for iron discipline and control. Many of the masters of this genre, carried away by their cleverness, their ability to encapsulate much in a little room, either convey or actually possess the quality of heartlessness: one thinks of Guy de Maupassant or Somerset Maugham.  Others – and one thinks primarily of Chekhov – are able to retain the discipline of the medium but suffuse its tight confines with warmth.  This is the quality of Elizabeth Berridge’s stories which sends us back to them, which makes us read and re-read until they have become friends. The woman who has lost her baby – and the female doctor; the house-proud men and women who have lost their possessions, people coming to terms with bereavement: they are all seen with the eyes not only of penetration and profound artistic intelligence, but also with gentleness and love.  These stories are much more than period pieces.

Extract from the Persphone Preface to Farewell Leicester Square by Betty Miller (Preface by Jane Miller)

The last novel she wrote, The Death of the Nightingale, which was published in 1948, took her back to the Ireland of her childhood and to a family riven by secrets and treacheries, and by the lasting injuries caused by a denial of the past. But the IRA background at the source of the novel makes a poor substitute in that novel for the particularities, the cadences and smells and sights of the Jewish childhood she starts from at the beginning of Farewell Leicester Square.

 

This is not the place to spell out resolutions and endings in the novel, and besides, Betty Miller, with a true sense of the complexity of the character she has created and the serious implications of the issues she has raised in Farewell Leicester Square, offers few, if any. It is clear that this was an immensely important book for her to write. It allowed her to interrogate her own ambivalence about being both Jewish and English, to see this in relation to marriage and family and children, and to set her story within a subtle account of class and prejudice in contemporary England. The fact that it might have struck many readers in 1935 as unguarded, and also,  perhaps, exaggerated and offering too many hostages to fortune, is likely to be read as a strength more than sixty years later. It is written boldly and honestly.  What St John Ervine called her ‘high, if hysterical sense of language’ is much less in evidence than in her earlier novels, though there is a little of this in the opening chapters.

Extract from the Persephone Preface to Consequences by E.M. Delafield  (Preface by Nicola Beauman)

…if the modern age can congratulate itself on one thing it is that misfits are – often, if not always – handled better than this. Alex would, quite possibly, have had some psychiatric help; she would have had it explained to her that the fault was not entirely in her, but in the unyieldingness of Nurse, Lady Clare and the nuns at her school; in essence, she would have been helped to understand herself and thus to value herself. Even more importantly, she would have been directed towards a career – because it would be recognised that Alex was not the marrying type – why should she have been? And she might perhaps have looked after horses, or worked in a library or in an orphanage, anywhere indeed where her deep need to be of service could be channelled into something more useful than futile adoration of some chosen person.

Thus, for me and – I hope – for Persephone readers, Consequences is a deeply feminist book. E.M. Delafield may be stopping short of ‘advocating any drastic solution’ – but only because she was a realist through and through. What she is saying is: this is how it was; empathise sigh groan, but accept that, with only a few exaggerations, my heroines life was like that and nothing, absolutely nothing, could then be done about it – unless by some miracle a disciple of Sigmund Freud had arrived from Vienna, or, equally miraculously, Alex had happened to meet somebody constructive and humane like a nurse or a market gardener or a suffragist (for, as the reviewer in the New York Times remarked shrewdly: ‘One feels that it was largely from such neurotic, defeated womanhood, chafing against its uselessness, as is represented inAlex Clare, that the militant suffragists recruited their explosive forces in the years before the war!)

Extract from the Persephone Preface to It’s Hard to be Hip Over Thirty by Judith Viorst (Preface by the Author)

…. though I continued to have plenty to say about the married state,  my attention and pen had also been captured by the astounding transformations of the Sixties. The new music, the new fashions, the new sexual freedom, the peace movement and civil rights movement and women’s movement had altered the world I had grown up in almost beyond recognition. I had touched on some of these changes in It’s hard to be Hip,  and they had certainly made an impact on my life where, in addition to the accoutrements of domesticity, I had acquired a beaded headband, a mini-dress composed of green and orange and shocking-pink plastic squares, a pair of white Go Go boots, and a feathered necklace which, my husband insisted, looked very much as if a pigeon had crashed into my chest and expired. I belonged to peace organisations and attended fund-raisers for civil-rights organisations and spent weekends picketing the White House or marching on the Pentagon or assembling at the Washington Monument with my little boys and a cast of thousands, all of us shouting, ‘What do we want? Freedom! When do we want it? Now!’ I learned to distinguish Pop art from Op art, the Twist from the Frug, and Ringo from George from Paul from John. I once went to jail for five hours for an act of anti-war civil disobedience. Ieven on a few occasions inhaled.

But in any contest between the political and psychedelic seductions of the Sixties and taking my kids to buy sneakers, the sneakers invariably won.

Extract from the Persephone Preface to Julian Grenfell by  Nicholas Mosley (Preface by the Author)

Tragic heroes are persons who seem trapped and doomed by their fate, but also in some sense responsible for it, because at a certain moment they might have got out. But could they? The moment when Julian might have got out was in 1909 when his book of essays, his profession of faith, had been rejected and mocked by everyone he hitherto cared about, and he felt he was engaged in some battle to the death with them. Or he might have got out later, when he was in Italy recovering from his depression: but then he chose quite deliberately not to get away. Perhaps it is the mark of a tragic hero to feel his life will be more meaningless if he tries to escape his fate that if he stays to face what he must glimpse will be the tragic consequences. Only thus will lessons be presented and learned. Why did Hamlet not get away when he had the chance, to England?

It would be good to think that by being able to look back at the customs and presuppositions of an earlier generation we might e able to learn, and perhaps we do; lessons have been accepted about war. But there are contradictions at the heart of our society not so different from those which entangled Ettie and Julian – conflicts between clinging to prejudices, and tolerance; between the urge to come out on top, and caring for neighbours or loved ones. Tragedies confront us with universal predicaments: we can learn not how to get rid of them, but perhaps by getting a clearer view of them to make them not senseless.

 

Extract from the Persephone Preface to Few Eggs and No Oranges: The Diaries of  Vere Hodgson (Preface by Jenny Hartley)

Sixty years after the events Vere Hodgson describes, we are in a position to compare her experiences with those on the other side of the battlefield, as she could not. Recently released documents about the German home front reveal more similarities than she might have suspected. Her views on retaliation, giving the enemy ‘a taste of their own medicine’, were shared by German women, but so too was her experience that a community grows stronger under fire. The campaign of  mass bombing of civilian targets by the RAF began with Lübeck in early 1942. Vere Hodgson comments: ‘We are all heartened by the terrible raids of Lübeck and Rostock. It is dreadful to be so glad – but we cannot be anything else.’ She herself, however, was in a good position to realise that bombing can have the reverse effect on civilian morale to that intended, as was the case in Lübeck where an observer reported: ‘Never before has the sense of community and sense of belonging been so clearly demonstrated as during that night’.

Extract from the Persephone Preface to Good Evening, Mrs Craven: The Wartime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes. (Preface by Gregory Lestage)

The stories fortify each other with their shared context. They are brief, dramatic – and comic – testimonials to the ordinary English women who did not fight in the war, but lived through it as acutely as any soldier. They are representatives of the ‘other’ war fiction, not written by and/or about men in uniform and in action, but by women for whom war was often a completely different experience, despite the proximity of death. It is necessary to remember that more civilians were killed than soldiers between 1939 and 1941. Therefore, one must read them as war stories, not simply as stories written during the period, 1939-1944. In this sense, they make an important claim within war literature: that wartime experience is not a male franchise. Because they are an altogether different kind of war story – a woman’s – everything is changed, particularly how one should approach them sixty years later. Women writers evoke war, in the words of Elizabeth Bowen, ‘more as territory than as a page of history’.

Extract from the Persephone Preface to The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher (preface by Karen Knox)

‘In The Home-Maker Dorothy Canfield Fisher reveals in terms that many readers can understand and appreciate, the feelings of powerlessness and futility which the husband and wife in the story, as well as the children, feel in their particular roles. These roles are dictated not by the individual but by the society, the culture and tradition, with a capital T. She herself viewed the novel not so much as a feminist one as a children’s one – not of course, a novel for children, though many early adolescents would sympathise and commiserate with the Knapp children, but certainly a novel of children: thus in October 1924 she told her American publisher that the book “should be taken as a whoop not for ‘women’s rights’ but for ‘children’s rights’.”’

But above all, it is a plea for the life of the home-maker to be valued and also, equally importantly, rationalised.  “The danger of becoming held and mastered by triviality” was something that Dorothy Canfield Fisher referred to very often. It was significant that she wrote in a letter towards the end of her life that: “The little things of life, of no real importance, but which have to be ‘seen to’ by American home-makers, is like a blanket smothering out the fine and great potential qualities in every one of us.”’

Extract from the Persephone Preface to The Victorian Chaise-longue by Marghanita Laski (preface by P.D. James)

When I first read The Victorian Chaise-longue in 1953, the year in which it was published, it impressed me as one of the most skillfully-told and terrifying short novels of its decade. Re-reading it over forty years later confirms both the admiration and the terror. The novel involves the reader in the most atavistic of human horror, confusion of identity and the realisation that one is inexorably trapped by circumstances which one can neither influence nor understand.

Extract from the Persephone Preface to An Interrupted Life: The Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943 (preface by Eva Hoffman)

When we pick up Etty Hillesum’s diaries and letters today, we know from the outset what will come at their tragic end. And yet, to start reading them is to be jolted into fresh surprise. All the writings she left behind were composed in the shadow of the Holocaust, but they resist being read primarily in its dark light. Rather, their abiding interest lies in the light-filled mind that pervades them and in the astonishing internal journey that they chart. The trajectory of that journey echoes classical accounts of spiritual transformation; but Etty’s pilgrimage grew out of the intimate experience of an intellectual young woman – it was idiosyncratic, individual and recognisably modern.

Extract from the Introduction by Jan G. Gaarlandt

These exercise books set out the story of a twenty-seven-year-old woman from Amsterdam. They cover the years 1941 and 1942, years of war and oppression for Holland, but for Etty a time of personal growth and, paradoxically enough, of personal liberation. These were the very years when the scenario of extermination was being played out all over Europe. Etty Hillesum was Jewish and she wrote a counter-scenario.

Extract from the Persephone Preface to Fidelity by Susan Glaspell (preface by Laura Godwin)

‘This most beautifully named novel exposes the limitations of life in a Midwestern town, not unlike Davenport [the author’s hometown], as experienced by a young woman who falls in love with a married man … and elopes with him. It asks the question which is, in essence, was it worth it? Was it worth it for herself, her family, for those she lives among? Was it worth being shut out by society in which, previously, she had lived so securely and so happily and which, after all, was necessary to her well-being? Was her fidelity to her love and her ideals worth it in the end? Or should an individual’s sense of integrity be the only thing that matters?’

Extract from the Persephone Preface to Someone at a Distance (preface by Nina Bawden)

‘Someone at a Distance is, on the face of it, a fairly ordinary tale… But it is a great gift to be able to take an ordinary tale and make it compulsive reading. It is all in the telling and Dorothy Whipple is a storyteller – an art that cannot be taught, cannot be learned, an art only a few writers are lucky enough to be born with. At the end of the novel you can look back and see how it was done, how the author held your attention and persuaded you how one thing was bound to lead to the next, but while you are reading you are only aware of the suspense, the need to turn the page…’

‘Writing about an earlier novel, Greenbanks, a Book Society Choice, Hugh Walpole says that ‘the business of characters leaping strongly to individual life is one of the oddest and most unaccountable things. No novelist, however hard he try, can be sure whether this miracle will be granted to him or not.’ To his mind, it had been granted to Dorothy Whipple who had ‘performed splendidly the great job of the novelist, increased for us infinitely the population of the living world.’

Extract from the Persephone Preface to Mariana (preface by Harriet Lane)

‘Mariana was, said its author in later life, “the novel that is everyone’s second book (if it was not their first), based on my childhood and growing up.” If she underestimated it, so did some critics, who were perhaps tempted to dismiss its subject matter: crushes, horses, school, raffish uncles, frocks, inconsequential jobs, love affairs. “Mariana will be fun for those who like to look through other people’s snap-albums and listen to the usual commentary,” was the waspish verdict from Christopher Barton in the New Statesman and Nation. Of course, it is Mariana’s artlessness, its enthusiasm, its attention to tiny, telling domestic detail that makes it so appealing to modern readers. As a snap-album – as a portrait of a certain sort of girl at a certain time in a certain place – it seems, seventy years after publication, entirely exotic.

‘Yet it also deals with timeless, familiar concerns that are once again admissible after a long period in the wilderness. After all, this is the sometimes comic story of a young woman trying, often quite desperately, to occupy her days while waiting for the arrival of the right young man: a plot that would probably ring some bells with a certain Bridget Jones. It is one of those miraculous books that, when you stumble on it as a teenager, seems to have been written with you and your concerns in mind… Mariana belongs, quite triumphantly, to the hot-water bottle genre of fiction.’