I’ve recently returned from a rejuvenating and inspiring weekend in Bath for the Persephone Festival, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the independent publisher of domestic women’s fiction. For anyone unfamiliar with Persephone, the house was founded by Nicola Beauman in 1999 to champion neglected women’s fiction of the interwar years, with titles focusing on family life, love and war.
Over the weekend the Persephone shop was buzzing with festival-goers and crammed, as always, with beautiful ceramics, jugs of flowers and teetering piles of books. I love Persephone’s pared-back vintage aesthetic and couldn’t resist buying one of their beautiful tote bags.
The first event we attended focused on Persephone’s most popular author, Dorothy Whipple. The event sold out in under 3 minutes and yet Whipple is little known today, her reputation not having endured like those of her contemporaries Barbara Pym and Elizabeth Jane Howard. Writers Rachel Joyce, Harriet Evans and Lucy Mangan posited why this might be – an unglamorous name perhaps, novels with less than catchy titles, her northern heritage and a lack of male champions. However, despite their prosaic titles, her novels throb with domestic dissatisfaction and are utterly compelling. I devoured Because of the Lockwoods in a couple of days.
Single women in Persephone books was the topic of our second event, with the panel of Gill Hornby, Charlie Lee-Potter and Samantha Ellis debating the joys of ‘spinster clusters’ and the creative freedoms enjoyed by single women of means, such as Jane and Cassandra Austen and the Brontes. Not such sad spinsters after all!
No trip to Bath would be complete without visits to Topping & Company with its elegant tables of tulips and signed first editions and Mr B’s, where I always discover new titles to add to my TBR shelf (this time it was In Love by Alfred Hayes, Winter Love by Han Suyin and The Divorcees by Rowan Beaird). We rounded off the trip with yet more tea and cake in the excellent Nata & Co and returned home happily laden with a stack of charity bookshop finds.
Hopefully Persephone’s reach will continue to extend and this Festival will be the first of many.