This week the Persephone team had their annual Christmas drinks at Landrace: champagne, classy bread and butter, olives (‘these are the best olives I’ve ever had’) and gougères (a kind of cheesy puff). This was to give everyone strength for the final lap before the postman came at 4.30pm on Friday 19th and after that we can’t guarantee books will arrive by Christmas Eve (though mostly they do). And then we all have to accept that ’tis the season to be jolly (even those of us who, embarrassing to admit it, aren’t that keen on Christmas and make a big effort to conform). Delightfully, the drinks this year were enlivened by a Persephone quiz, devised by Maddy aged 18 (first year of uni but a Persephone girl in the holidays), it was great fun except that, embarrassingly, the writer of this Letter couldn’t answer half the questions; this was partly because she has never learnt all the numbers of the books whereas ‘the girls’ (with younger brains) know them all; and partly because, when a question is asked like ‘when did Persephone move into the shop in Lamb’s Conduit Street?’, well it was rather a long time ago. (The entire list of questions is on Instagram here.) Nevertheless, fuelled by champagne and olives, we had a very jolly time. And Fran wore her Christmas sweater.

Meanwhile, the last few weeks have been rather un-jolly because there have been SO many deaths of people we hugely admired, just coincidence we know but nevertheless sobering, among them Jilly Cooper, Rachel Cooke, Susanna Gross, Skye Gyngell, Sophie Kinsella, Joanna Trollope, that towering genius Tom Stoppard, and John Carey. Indian Ink is being revived at the Hampstead theatre and Arcadia at the Old Vic (although very sadly it won’t have Rufus Sewell, as it so memorably did in 1993); and any books by John Carey are worth reading, but we are particularly fond of Sunday Best: 80 Great Books from a Lifetime of Reviews. This is a nice sentence from the Guardian obituary of John Carey: ‘He was anti-elitist, anti-Bloomsbury, anti-anything that, as he saw it, patronised the tastes of ordinary readers or hindered their enjoyment of literature, and could wield his pen like a scythe.’ That would be good on a tombstone: ‘Here lies Professor John Carey who could wield his pen like a scythe.’ 

But the slight gloom induced by all these deaths is being dispelled by anticipating some fun lunches out eg in Paris after Marina O’Loughlin in the FT recommended Cheval d’Or in Belleville: ‘the place is beautiful, food is beautiful, staff are beautiful’ or, nearer to home, her second recommendation which is Grumbles, a bistro in Pimlico that apparently hasn’t changed in sixty years, in a good way. (And a visit could be combined with the Turner and Constable exhibition at Tate Britain.)

We are also planning a trip to Dorchester to see the new statue of one of ‘our’ authors, Sylvia Townsend Warner (although of course there is a tremendous irony about it being outside a shop selling fripperies...)

And we are planning a trip to Cambridge to look at the Amy Levy archive, which was recently acquired by Cambridge University Library, and will have a new afterword to Reuben Sachs, PB no. 23, based on what we find there, next time we reprint; also we were so pleased that Jonathan Coe chose Crooked Cross as his ‘old’ book of the year in the Observer; and in our dreams we are going to Washington DC to see the exhibition ‘Women Artists from Antwerp to Amsterdam 1600-1750’. This is a detail from Self-Portrait at her Easel by Maria Schalcken (1645-1700).

The Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings, SPAB, had a very good issue about women who helped to shape the future of building conservation  and who, interestingly, were ‘often linked to the campaigns for women’s education and suffrage’. The issue included a feature on Emilie Montgomery Gardner who ‘made a substantial and significant record of historic rulings and campaigned for the vital contribution of watermills to our built heritage.’ In 1908 she and two friends travelled from Glasgow to Oxford in a traditional caravan, making frequent stops en route to campaign for votes for women.

There was an exhibition of Denton Welch’s paintings at John Swarbrooke Fine Art . Here is an article about it by Hannah Silver in Wallpaper. Isn’t this painting simply amazing? Every detail is perfect and really, why the artist is not considered a 'great' painter goodness only knows. It's Portrait of Denton Welch by Gerald Mackenzie Leet (1913-1998) painted in 1935 when, unbelievably, Leet was only 22, and it's in a private collection (lucky person). 

Our author Elisabeth de Waal, who wrote The Exiles Return, PB no. 102, and Milton Place, PB no. 131, corresponded with the poet Rilke and now, excitingly, the letters (edited by her grandson Edmund de Waal) are to be published.

Briefly, because so few people listen (they are presumably too busy reading a Persephone book), R4's The Archers and in particular George: why oh why did no one give him any help when he came out of prison? Is it that as a society we apparently do not provide a social worker or psychiatrist or even a grown-up friend to give people assistance when they are returned to the world?  But why? It is painful watching him floundering because no one is saying, look here George why don't you... And, truly, most listeners would have no idea that we seem just to leave ex-prisoners to flounder. It's painful to hear.

Next April we are publishing the much-anticipated sequel to Crooked Cross, The Prisoner. In preparation for this we have been doing more research into the author, Sally Carson, We have made plenty of progress, discovering for example that she attended Bournemouth High School and then Bedford College where she studied dance and gymnastics and is pictured here with friends, top right, sitting on the well. 

However, we have still not managed to find out much about Sally Carson's life between 1929 and 1933, when she must have spent time in or near Germany, observing the events that she then wrote about in Crooked Cross. But where? And why? And with whom?  Perhaps she was teaching dance at a Bavarian hotel like she’d been doing in East Sussex? Or was she visiting a friend in Germany, for example the family of Margaret ‘Peggy’ Behrens, her future husband’s first wife? She wrote some of The Prisoner in Schliersee, but what took her there? (We tried contacting the Schliersee town hall, but no luck so far). We also know she visited Switzerland in c. 1929 and Austria in 1934, but her connection to Germany remains a mystery. So if any Persephone readers would like to do some historical detective work on our behalf, we’d be delighted. N.B. She might have been using the name Sylvia Carson at the time, rather than Sally.

Finally, thank you so much to everyone who supports Persephone Books in such positive ways, reads this Letter, contributes enormously by buying and (more importantly) reading our books –  and very warm Christmas greetings to you all.

Nicola Beauman,

8 Edgar Buildings, Bath.