Persephone Books and Dorothy Whipple's short stories

 I first came across Persephone Books at the age of twelve, when an older friend at school who had just left for university told me that her favourite book outside the writings of Jane Austen was Mariana by Monica Dickens. Naturally, I had to get hold of a copy. I can't remember if I was surprised by its appearance or not, but I certainly now love the way they look- chic and understated. That said, I love the Classics editions too and if they bring Persephone to a wider readership, that can only be a good thing. The endpapers are all beautiful and are chosen with such care (the ones for Marjory Fleming by Oriel Malet have to be my favourites). I didn't get any more Persephones after Mariana for a long time (they are expensive and it was before everything was available at the click of a button), but found myself completely addicted to 'middlebrow' women's writing of the early to mid C20 about a year and a half ago. I wish I'd discovered it all a few months earlier as I could have done my dissertation on it. Oh well. I've had the most amazing luck finding them in charity shops (in London, Leamington Spa, Leicester, Kenilworth, Chichester), for which I am unbelievably grateful, and now have quite a nice collection (fifteen and counting). I don't always agree with everything Nicola Beauman says, but the books are consistently excellent and illuminating. I think they have an good balance of 'hot water bottle' reads (Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day was my refuge on my most depressing evening of the year) and more serious works. I think both can be equally satisfying. If I had to choose a favourite, it would have to be Saplings by Noel Streatfeild, which left me a little numb upon completion. It never should have gone out of print and ought to be on every Literature of World War II reading list. It must be the most wonderful place to work- it was hard not to feel a bit jealous of the (delightful) woman who served us when my mother and I went to the Lamb's Conduit Street shop to choose three for my birthday.

Dorothy Whipple is probably Persephone's flagship author, and it isn't difficult to see why. Her books are so readable and unputdownable. They're of their time in the sense that the world she knew is very different to what we're familiar with today, but they're also timeless. I flew through Someone at a Distance and They Knew Mr Knight even though the climax in both was inevitable.  It's quite easy to underestimate the simplicity of her writing- it's probably just as tricky to do effectively as [insert complex literary form of your choice]. I wish I could be more like that, I have a tendency to write in sentences that go on forever. This style works very well in the short story form as there's nothing fussy about them.  

The Closed Door and Other Stories is definitely not a comfort read- all the stories are rather bleak in their way and I've never encountered so much bad parenting in one book! Many of the stories are variations on the same theme- parents who use their daughters (always a daughter, never a son) as unpaid servants, and it really is quite horrifying and comparable to slavery. The title story for some reason reminded me a bit of an Eva Ibbotson novel ("Ernest and Alice Hart had not expected or wished for children and after ten years of uneventful matrimony, they viewed the birth of a daughter with dismay"). However, if it had been an Ibbotson novel, the daughter Stella would have been remarkably beautiful and accomplished and found some dramatic means of escape, but Whipple is too much of a realist to allow that to happen, as any possibilities (such as an encounter with a young man named Jimmy in a tea shop) are thwarted by her parents who realise that having a daughter isn't so bad after all, as they'll have someone to look after them in their old age. Her eventual marriage to a kindly, much older doctor starts off well, but turns sour when her widowed mother moves in with them, making life absolute hell. I like to think that Whipple is depicting a particularly extreme example, but it makes one wonder how common lives like this were, as it's certainly a point of fascination here. The second longest story, 'Family Crisis,' about a daughter's elopement with a con man, is shown from a rather Mr Collins-esque father's point of view (with a surprisingly hopeful ending) and 'After Tea' has a particularly interesting twist. Amongst the 'other' stories, I particularly liked the quiet devastation of 'Wednesday,' about a divorcée's (tricked into committing adultery by her ex-husband) monthly visit with her children- a mother who actually loves her children (a rarity in this collection!), but finds them gradually slipping away from her ("She was Mummy and her supplanter was 'Mumsie.' The children had jibbed it at first. They wouldn't say it. But they said it now without a thought"). Simple and heartbreaking.

The second book I chose for Persephone reading week is the Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum, which is very long and dense (perhaps I should have chosen something shorter...), and I probably won't finish it for a while, but a review will be forthcoming when I do.