14 February 2020

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And finally, on Valentine’s Day, Persephone’s overall bestselling writer, Dorothy Whipple. We have published her eight novels and two volumes of short stories (there might be a third but they would be rather ‘scraping the barrel’) and this autumn we bring out her non-fiction diaries about her writing life, Random Commentary. Her lastĀ novelĀ Someone at a Distance, which is Persephone Book No. 3 and also a Persephone Classic, would not be seen by academics ie. keepers of the canon as anything but a middlebrow woman’s novel; but in our view it is far more than that, profound about women and marriage and domestic life, as well as page-turning. Dorothy Whipple is the natural heir to Mrs Gaskell and will be seen as such one day; but goodness these things seem to take a long time.