A Very Great Profession

‘A Very Great Profession’ is such a terrific introduction to women’s writing of the inter-war period. Organised into subject headings such as ‘War’, ‘Surplus Women’, ‘Feminism’, and ‘Domesticity’ and making clear distinctions between ‘Romance’, ‘Love’ and ‘Sex’, the book introduces dozens of writers and clearly places them in historical and literary contexts. I have discovered so many great and enjoyable books from this critical study and from Persephone Books which I collect.

I read the first paragraphs of ‘A Very Great Profession’ and was surprisingly hooked. It is described as a book of literary criticism, which perhaps makes it sound a little drier than it is. Subtitled “The Woman’s Novel 1914-39” it really is right up my alley. I found it completely absorbing, a real celebration of many of the kinds of books I love – written by the founder of Persephone books and originally published by Virago in 1983. In this book Nicola Beauman looks at women like Katherine in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Night and Day’ and Laura in the film ‘Brief Encounter’. These were women who borrowed books from the circulating libraries, and whose lives were so often recorded in the very fiction that they read. Following her introduction – in which Beauman explains how the book was conceived and written – each of the eight chapters takes a different theme: war, domesticity, sex, psychoanalysis etc. Drawing on numerous novels from this period between the two wars Beauman explores the lives that were being led by the middle-class women who would have read them. These novels often reflected the changing lives of women – and what the middle-class concerns of many at this period were. Throughout this book I loved reading the extracts from the novels I had previously enjoyed as well as encountering many I had never heard of. Each chapter is just wonderfully immersive for the lover of novels from this period – largely those written by women though one or two by male writers are included. This book was an easy five star read for me; I knew that when I had only read a third of it – I was so thoroughly absorbed I gulped it down quickly. It is surely a must for any lover of the kinds of novels published by Virago and Persephone. Nicola Beauman is an able literary critic: she fully understands these novels and the women who read them and how inextricably linked the readers and the novels were – and I dare say still are. This book is now my favourite book about books I have read for some time.