May we have a (very small) rant about David Attenborough’s Ocean only being available in (some) cinemas and on Disney? Did the success of Mr Bates vs The Post Office not teach television executives anything? People take far, far more notice of a television drama than a documentary. Get someone to write a six-part series about, for example, a small fishing community and the horrors that industrialised fishing methods inflict on their patch of ocean and that will rouse people. 

And yet, rather sickeningly, the Mitford sisters are being rolled out yet again (yes, The Pursuit of Love is one of the funniest novels ever written, but the sisters themselves were appalling), while Jane Austen and her novels have recently been given a three-part mix of documentary, interviews with 'Janeites' (fans), and dramatisation; all the while hugely important topics are shoved into the naughty corner marked documentary. That is why we are so, so proud of novels like National Provincial or No Surrender or The Hopkins Manuscript, oh a dozen of them: they are fiction but about crucial political issues. And it's why thousands of people are being amazed by PB no. 152 Crooked Cross: they have read history books about the 1930s and seen television documentaries, but a novel is making it all real to them. (And then when they get to the end they want to know what happens next, and as a result we have had many people asking about the 1936 and 1938 sequels. Yes, in a year or two we shall publish these, in one volume. But do not expect a happy ending.)

More cheerfully, when we were in London we used to organise a Mrs Dalloway walk, it was led by ex-Persephone girl and now academic at King’s London, Clara Jones, and we would do the walk – roughly the route that Clarissa Dalloway does in the book – on whichever date happened to be the second Wednesday in June. This year it was June 11th. We were pleased to see that, following in our footsteps, several Mrs Dalloway walks took place last week.

‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself’ we sometimes say to each other as we scoot down to the florist in Milsom Street or to Waitrose (it’s the opening line of the novel). However, this week we were sent the most beautiful flowers by a film-maker who came to interview us, asked to do so by Blackburn Library. It has been given the marvellous sum of £30k by the Arts Council to publicise Blackburn's best writer – Dorothy Whipple.

Back to London: E M Delafield’s play To See Ourselves is being put on in Kennington during the first two weeks of July, tickets here. Quite rightly, the theatre company calls it 'a lost theatrical gem, as witty, engaging and thought provoking as anything by Noel Coward'. Fans of Diary of a Provincial Lady (and who isn't?) will enjoy it very much indeed.

There was an article in the FT about Bloomsbury (its rise and rise) illustrated with this picture.

It gave us rather a shock, and perhaps a lump in the throat – we so well remember campaigning for a tree to be planted outside Persephone Books after we arrived in 2001, and when it was finally in situ going out with a watering can. Then a branch was torn off by a lorry and the tree was rather mangled, but look how it has survived!

We cannot wait to go to V & A East Storehouse, which is such a great concept: it’s a repository of quarter of a million objects that are/were in store but we, the public, can 'call up' any five of them, or simply wander round looking at the things displayed on open shelves. Go the website here, have an extensive browse, pick what you want to see and book a slot, or just amble serendipitously. (We were delighted to see that the first object under 'Finding objects and booking tips' is the fabric we have used for the endpaper of How to Run Your Home without Help; and in fact we have never seen it IRL so shall definitely make it one of our five.)

This month Emily Gee publishes her book about working women’s lodgings. Called Hostel, House and Chambers, 'it is the first comprehensive study of the campaigns to house a new generation of working women. After 1900, the rapid rise of women working as clerks, secretaries or typists, in London and other cities, created an urgent need for affordable and respectable accommodation. Building on models of elegant Victorian ladies’ residential chambers and the vast working men’s lodging houses, a new type of single working women’s hostel emerged. They featured efficiently planned tiny private spaces alongside generous communal dining and sitting rooms, as well as libraries, music rooms and bicycle stores. Emphatically not charitable or municipal affairs, these were business-minded enterprises, established and advocated by other Edwardian women. In turn, these little-known buildings supported, enabled and empowered a new generation of intrepid working women.'

We publish a short story in which a young woman lives in one of these hostels. There will be a prize of a free copy of the Persephone book in which the story appears sent to the first three people who email info@persephonebooks.co.uk telling us which book it is.

Those of us who read English Literature at university, or are about to read it in the case of one of the Persephone girls, will want to get hold of a new book called Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain by Stefan Collini. (But why oh why is it £35? The ebook is cheaper but nevertheless…) Naturally, what we want to read about is attitudes to women writers, who were generally ignored until the 21st century (apart from Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot) and even now the ‘canon’ is carefully circumscribed ie. it’s fine to work on Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Townsend Warner or Malachi Whitaker or (stretching it) on Rosamond Lehmann but absolutely verboten to work on Mollie Panter-Downes or Marghanita Laski or Dorothy Whipple or Edith Ayrton Zangwill. But why? Who makes these decisions and who has to abide by their rules? Well, undergraduates have to or they won’t get their degrees. And PhD students also have to stick to the canon or they won’t get funding. 

Readers of the last Persephone letter will know that we are a little bit obsessed with James Lees-Milne’s diaries, a morally acceptable form of gossip but with the added good gloss that he was a lynchpin of the National Trust. Anyway, as we read one volume after another (there are twelve) there were things we didn't understand and we had to go to the biography by Michael Bloch to find out. Lees-Milne writes a lot in his diaries about the destruction of Bath (which would be partly halted by the publication of Adam Fergusson’s The Sack of Bath in 1973) and in the biography we found that in September 1970 he wrote ‘with fuming sarcasm’ to the editor of The Times: 'Your readers may be interested to learn that we are getting on quite nicely with the demolition of the centre of Bath. This year alone we have swept away several acres between Lansdown Road and The Circus. The whole southern end of Walcot Street (including the nineteenth century burial ground with tombstones) has already gone. We are just beginning on Northgate Street, and have only knocked down two or three houses in Broad Street this month. But New Bond Street’s turn is imminent. All the homes are (or were) Georgian, every one.'

It was only with the intervention of the Government in 1973, which offered money for the conservation of Bath, ie persuaded the local council to cease with offers of money, that the demolition stopped. We often think bitterly, particularly if we find ourselves in the ‘several acres’ Lees-Milne refers to, of the philistinism of that council fifty years ago. Maybe one day we'll be as good at building in replica as they are in Eastern Europe eg. in Warsaw or Prague.

Bath inhabitants or visitors should try and walk on the Bathwick Fields in the next week or two: the wild flowers are glorious.

Finally, anyone in Paris must make a point of going to the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at the Pompidou (before it closes for five years). He is a hugely imaginative and intelligent artist, and one of his posters hangs in the shop. We love him particularly because he gave us the whole set of anti-Brexit posters in 2016 ie. he is not only brilliant but generous and kind.

Nicola Beauman

8 Edgar Buildings