As part of the Bloomsbury Festival this year, Persephone Bookshop on Lambs Conduit Street hosted a hour of cream teas, beautiful book design and conversations about women writers. Persephone Books is a delightful bookshop and publisher focusing on the neglected fiction and non-fiction works by women, for women and about women. The titles are chosen to appeal to busy women who rarely have time to spend in ever-larger bookshops and would like to have access to a list of books designed to be neither too literary nor too commercial. The books are guaranteed to be readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget. The afternoon was a chance to speak to the owner’s of the shop, as well as like-minded readers and interesting Bloomsbury residents. I was recommended Farewell Leicester Square by Betty Miller and The New House by Lettice Cooper.
Betty Miller wrote this, her fourth novel, in 1935. In the novel Alec Berman escapes from his restrictive Jewish family in Brighton, and although he has a successful career as a film-maker (perhaps modelled on that of Alexander Korda) and marries the very English Catherine, he always feels a ‘Dago: Jew: Outsider.’ ‘Yet,’ continued Neal Ascherson, ‘the rejection is not really the refusal of a snobbish Gentile world fully to accept him. The rejecting force comes from within himself.’ ‘A thought-provoking insight into anti-semitism between the wars,’ wrote the Guardian, ‘not the violent prejudice of Mosley’s fascists, but the discreet discrimination of the bourgeoisie.’
‘All that outwardly happens in The New House,’ writes Jilly Cooper in her Persephone preface, ‘is over one long day a family moves from a large imposing secluded house with beautiful gardens to a small one overlooking a housing estate. But all the characters and their relationships with each other are so lovingly portrayed that one cares passionately what happens even to the unpleasant ones. ‘The New House, first published in 1936, reminds me of my favourite author Chekhov, who so influenced Lettice’s generation of writers. Like him, she had perfect social pitch and could draw an arriviste developer as convincingly as a steely Southern social butterfly.’
Images: My Own
