1. Persephone Books arose out of years of being at home with small children: so much time to rediscover twentieth century women writers, as well as to buy books for 20p or go to the London Library and come home with an armful of forgotten novels. Once the children were older there was time to read in the British Museum reading room and browse in second-hand bookshops. Now there’s the Internet.

2. Many of our titles are written about in the 1983 book A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel, 1914-1939 by Nicola Beauman, the founder of Persephone Books. This is a ground-breaking mix of literary criticism and social history and really where it all began.

3. All our titles in some way focus on women’s everyday lives: what we think of as ‘domestic feminism’. They are linked by the idea of 'home', though of course that doesn't preclude their characters also having a career or flying an aeroplane.

4. Our books mostly date from the mid-C20th, specifically the inter-war period. Why this focus on the 1930s and 1940s? A quick answer is that women simply wrote so well then. But also many were well educated, yet society was not yet ready to allow them to work outside the home: writing was a good compromise. 

5. Ideally ‘the novel tells a story’ (EM Forster). In other words, we prefer books that are page-turners and a guaranteed good read. They must, for example, have a proper plot.

6. Sometimes we realise that a book of classic quality is unaccountably not in print (Mariana, Little Boy Lost, The Expendable Man). 

7. Persephone readers kindly suggest books: Henrietta Twycross-Martin told us that Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day was her mother’s favourite; the late Neville Braybrooke sent us his wife Isobel English’s novel Every Eye ; Helen Tilly wrote her thesis on Sofia Petrovna and came into the bookshop one summer afternoon and told us about it. 

8. Occasionally a title feels particularly timely, for example The Montana Stories came out 80 years after Katherine Mansfield's death and we published Crooked Cross in 2025 because it is about the rise of authoritarian governments. 

9. We sometimes find books in rather odd ways. Lettice Delmer was ‘puffed’ by TS Eliot on the flap of another book; the author of The Happy Tree was mentioned intriguingly in Virginia Woolf’s diary; we read an obituary of the author of One Afternoon in the Guardian, and so on.

10. Finally, but most importantly, we have to completely and utterly love every title. It is a cliché of publishing that a book will not sell unless someone is passionately behind it. Each must have a special quality to justify the expense and commitment of its re-publication.

And thus, just like the goddess Persephone emerged back into the light, so do our books.