The Queen came to visit us last week. She had been to the Holburne Museum and the Theatre Royal and then, because she is a great reader, she came to Persephone Books. Fran showed her round the bookshop and afterwards she sat at the ‘wrapping table’ with myself and Fran and had a cup of tea.

We talked about the process of turning one rare copy of Crooked Cross into thousands of Persephone books (40,000 and counting); about the wonder of Dorothy Whipple; about the brilliance of Elizabeth Jane Howard (The Cazalet Chronicles, and her best novel The Long View); and finally about Upstairs, Downstairs and Foyle's War (which no one under 50 will have heard of, poor them). Fran wrote about the royal visit on Instagram and the detail that was picked up by the world’s press was that I wasn’t sure whether to put the milk in the Queen’s tea or proffer the milk jug.(Happily I didn’t utter the phrase ‘will you be mother?’ which, for non UK readers, means will you pour the tea?) My goodness, the Queen was so easy to talk to and so ‘normal’ and when she left the bookshop the atmosphere of affection surrounding her as she made her way through the crowd to the car was heartwarming. And we were proud that she was allowed to mingle, and shake hands, with everyone: although the police and security people were very much ‘on it’ you wouldn’t have known. 

 And, btw, one of our team made the biscuits. Although they weren’t eaten by the Queen (she doesn’t eat when on duty, but she did drink the tea) they were simply delicious. The cheese biscuits were the recipe of the late Rachel Cooke as famously given to Simon Hopkinson (100 grams each of butter, flour and cheese whizzed together and ideally left in the fridge for a while before being cut into thin biscuits (ours were triangular), brushed with beaten egg and baked till golden.

We didn’t ask but surely the Queen loves The Archers? It has been so good recently, as has Radio 4 in general. There was a Saturday in early February when it began with an interview with Gordon Brown and his sanity was so cheering that he almost made one forget the ghastliness of the news. Then there was The Week in Westminster, The News Quiz, all the usual. And  later in the day the pianist Imogen Cooper was on our favourite This Cultural Life, she was fascinating; this was followed by a programme about changing attitudes to infancy, motherhood and the role of the state over the last few decades (eg, a baby born in 1980 would have been whisked away to a cot while a baby born twenty years later would immediately be given to its mother to hold); and after that there was a programme about Mrs Dalloway featuring ex-Persephone girl and now marvellous academic Clara Jones. Heaven.

Two events to which we are looking forward: on Friday March 27th we shall show the film of The Homemaker. It is a 1925 silent film and there will be a live piano accompaniment by the pianist Jim Godfrey; tickets here. (If you came to the last showing of the film, which could not go ahead because the projector broke down, please of course ask for a free ticket.) We are also looking forward to the next Persephone Day on Saturday April 25th and hope to see a few of the readers of this Letter there: events include a talk about EM Forster, a launch party for PB no.154 The Prisoner featuring Charlotte Higgins of the Guardian, who wrote about Crooked Cross so eloquently, and a panel discussion on the subject of 'Our Favourite Persephone Books'. 

The novelist Gill Hornby chose PB no. 113 Greengates as her ‘favourite book by an underrated author’ in The Times. She called it ‘an absolute revelation’. ‘Mr Baldwin retires and falls into depression. Mrs Baldwin mourns her lost life, their future looms bleak until the day they take a walk in the country… and that’s pretty much it. Yet while Sherriff picks away at the humorous and the poignant in the diurnal he somehow simultaneously creates the narrative force of a thriller. A small masterpiece.’ Meanwhile John Self also in The Times wrote about PB no. 51 Operation Heartbreak thus: "A perfect novel is a rare thing. It has to be short because the longer the book is the more there is to go wrong. It has to be focused and bring out its ideas as intensely as possible. And there must be nothing else like it out there. To little gems like JL Carr’s A Month in the Country and Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These we can add Duff Cooper’s Operation Heartbreak…. It’s a love story without love, a war story without war, and a tale to rival William Boyd’s “whole life” novels while coming in at one third of the length…"

Our free Shared Reading sessions have restarted fortnightly at the shop. It is a different type of book group whereby participants are given a few photocopied pages from a Persephone book, the group reads aloud a paragraph at a time and talks about it. Curiously, the short extracts tell one SO much about the book, obviously not as much as reading the whole thing but enough to be memorable and interesting. (The flowers we had  on the table were in the Emma Bridgewater pomegranate bowl made especially for the celebrations for our 100th book.)

We are very pleased that Shared Reading in Liverpool has chosen PB no. 7 The Homemaker as one of the books for their 2026 'Deep Read', ie four sessions, under the theme of The Home We Carry, here. Every Shared Reading session has a  trained leader, one of them said: 'Reading The Homemaker with a group of young mothers was wonderful because it expressed so vividly what the group members were all going through, but from the perspectives of the child and both parents too – all the frustrations and the joy and beauty of trying to keep a child safe but also letting it grow and learn.'

Dominic Sandbrook, of the Rest is History podcast, has started another podcast, it’s called The Book Club and of course we hope it becomes as massive as The Rest is History. We are optimistic because his favourite literary critic is John Carey and he is ours too (for example. Sunday Best, a collection his reviews, is SO good).

Do read Tina Brown’s hilarious review in the Observer of a book about Rupert Murdoch; if you haven’t caught up yet with the Amandaland Christmas Special, please treat yourself asap; and although we thought Hamnet was marvellous, a little bit of us agrees with the strictures expressed by A N Wilson (one of our esteemed preface writers, for PB no. 15 Tell It to a Stranger) on his substack.  

There is a talk on March 8th, International Women’s Day, at 8 pm at the Roman Baths about women in Roman Britain and there is a talk on March 25th at the Victoria Art Gallery (where the poster exhibition is on) about Clifford and Rosemary Ellis, Bath dwellers who left their archive to the Gallery.

And advance news. We publish the sequel to PB no. 152 Crooked Cross – PB no. 154 The Prisoner  – on April 16th and are delighted that the following Monday it will be Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 for two weeks. It is available already for pre-order though.

So now this Letter is finished, it’s time to print out the proof of our October book – Her Son’s Wife by Dorothy Canfield Fisher – and start trying to ensure it is typo free.

Nicola Beauman

8 Edgar Buildings

Bath.