Persephone Books discussion
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Next poll - re-reads
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Few Eggs and No OrangesMiss Ranskill Comes Home
Mariana
Consequences
Miss Buncle's Book
Tea with Mr. Rochester
Greenery Street
I really want to read all of the Persephones so picking any one of them is no problem with me. Have you ever given any thought to reading them in order?
Mod
Yes, I did think about going in order (I love doing things in order!), so that's something we could do in the future. The Persephone Forum is going through all of the books in order, if you're interested! I think they're up to 36 right now. http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/pers...
Here's another vote for Marianna, and Making Conversations sounds like a fun read. (So does their new book of short stories)
Mod
I'm new here, and I'd love to join you. Cynthia mentioned three that I own, so I'd be very interested in those:~Mariana
~Miss Buncle's Book
~Greenery Street
I think the new short stories collection looks great, too! I just finished Dimanche and Other Stories, and really enjoyed it.
Mod
Another vote for Mariana here! Also the new short stories book (not so very new now, they have some more new releases coming out this week!)
I nominate the following:-The Winds of Heaven
-Hostages to Fortune
-The Shuttle
I know they're rereads for the group but I haven't read any of them yet and they're all on my TBR shelf!
Mod
Mod
Here's a summary of each book from the Persephone website:
Mariana - Monica Dickens‘s first book, published in 1940, could easily have been called Mariana – an Englishwoman. For that is what it is: the story of a young English girl’s growth towards maturity in the 1930s.We see Mary at school in Kensington and on holiday in Somerset; her attempt at drama school; her year in Paris learning dressmaking and getting engaged to the wrong man; her time as a secretary and companion; and her romance with Sam. We chose this book because we wanted to publish a novel like Dusty Answer, I Capture the Castle or The Pursuit of Love, about a girl encountering life and love, which is also funny, readable and perceptive; it is a ‘hot-water bottle’ novel, one to curl up with on the sofa on a wet Sunday afternoon. But it is more than this. As Harriet Lane remarks in her Preface: ‘It is Mariana’s artlessness, its enthusiasm, its attention to tiny, telling domestic detail that makes it so appealing to modern readers.’ And John Sandoe Books in Sloane Square (an early champion of Persephone Books) commented: ‘The contemporary detail is superb – Monica Dickens’s descriptions of food and clothes are particularly good – and the characters are observed with vitality and humour. Mariana is written with such verve and exuberance that we would defy any but academics and professional cynics not to enjoy it.’
Miss Buncle's Book - The storyline of Miss Buncle’s Book (1934) is a simple one: Barbara Buncle, who is unmarried and perhaps in her late 30s, lives in a small village and writes a novel about it in order to try and supplement her meagre income. In this respect she is at one with Miss Pettigrew and Miss Ranskill, two other unmarried women who, not having subsumed their existence into that of a man, have to find a way of looking after themselves. There are some serious moments, for example when the doctor’s children are, very briefly, kidnapped (as a way of trying to force their mother to admit that she wrote the book; which she did not). But the seriousness is minimal – mostly this is an entirely light-hearted, easy read, one of those books like Mariana, Miss Pettigrew, The Making of a Marchioness and Greenery Street which can be recommended unreservedly to anyone looking for something undemanding, fun and absorbing that is also well-written and intelligent.
Greenery Street - PG Wodehouse described this 1925 novel as ‘so good that it makes one feel that it’s the only possible way of writing a book, to take an ordinary couple and just tell the reader all about them.’ Greenery Street can be read on two levels – it is a touching description of a young couple’s first year together in London, but it is also a homage – something rare in fiction – to happy married life.
Ian and Felicity Foster are shown as they arrive at 23 Greenery Street, an undisguised and still unchanged Walpole Street in Chelsea. Their uneventful but always interesting everyday life is the main subject of a novel that evokes the charmingly contented and timeless while managing to be both funny and profound about human relations.
Denis Mackail was a grandson of Edward Burne-Jones on his mother’s side and son of JW Mackail, the eminent classical scholar ; his sister was the novelist Angela Thirkell. He wrote nearly a book a year for thirty years.
The Winds of Heaven - The Winds of Heaven is a 1955 novel about ‘a widow, rising sixty, with no particular gifts or skills, shunted from one to the other of her more or less unwilling daughters on perpetual uneasy visits, with no prospect of her life getting anything but worse’ (Afterword). One daughter is the socially ambitious Miriam living in commuter belt with her barrister husband and children; one is Eva, an aspiring actress in love with a married man; and the third is Anne, married to a rough but kindly Bedfordshire smallholder who is the only one who treats Louise with more than merely dutiful sympathy. The one relation with whom she has any empathy is her grandchild.
The Winds of Heaven is very readable: like Dorothy Whipple or Marghanita Laski or Noel Streatfeild, Monica Dickens had the knack of writing about ordinariness while making the reader unable to put her books down. It is about family relationships: it seems rather cruel that all three of Louise’s daughters are so harsh to her but that, Monica Dickens is saying, is the way of the world.
As John Betjeman said in a Daily Telegraph review: ‘Monica Dickens is one of the most affectionate and humorous observers of the English scene, particularly of the pretensions of genteel suburban life, that we have. Not only this, but she can always tell a good story, touch the heart with a pleasant sentimental grace… I think The Winds of Heaven is her best novel yet.’’
While Elizabeth Bowen wrote in Tatler: ‘Monica Dickens has chosen a situation perfectly suited to her art – her sense of comedy, her affection for people and her almost uncanny knowledge of their small ways. Here, in fact, is humour at its most kindly… How well she sees extraordinary in the ordinary, and how familiar she is with all kinds of people… Not a page of The Winds of Heaven is not enjoyable: here’s a fine blend of comedy with sheer good sense.’
Mod
Greenery Street - PG Wodehouse described this 1925 novel as ‘so good that it makes one feel that it’s the only possible way of writing a book, to take an ordinary couple and just tell the reader all about them.’ Greenery Street can be read on two levels – it is a touching description of a young couple’s first year together in London, but it is also a homage – something rare in fiction – to happy married life.
Ian and Felicity Foster are shown as they arrive at 23 Greenery Street, an undisguised and still unchanged Walpole Street in Chelsea. Their uneventful but always interesting everyday life is the main subject of a novel that evokes the charmingly contented and timeless while managing to be both funny and profound about human relations.
Denis Mackail was a grandson of Edward Burne-Jones on his mother’s side and son of JW Mackail, the eminent classical scholar ; his sister was the novelist Angela Thirkell. He wrote nearly a book a year for thirty years.
The Winds of Heaven - The Winds of Heaven is a 1955 novel about ‘a widow, rising sixty, with no particular gifts or skills, shunted from one to the other of her more or less unwilling daughters on perpetual uneasy visits, with no prospect of her life getting anything but worse’ (Afterword). One daughter is the socially ambitious Miriam living in commuter belt with her barrister husband and children; one is Eva, an aspiring actress in love with a married man; and the third is Anne, married to a rough but kindly Bedfordshire smallholder who is the only one who treats Louise with more than merely dutiful sympathy. The one relation with whom she has any empathy is her grandchild.
The Winds of Heaven is very readable: like Dorothy Whipple or Marghanita Laski or Noel Streatfeild, Monica Dickens had the knack of writing about ordinariness while making the reader unable to put her books down. It is about family relationships: it seems rather cruel that all three of Louise’s daughters are so harsh to her but that, Monica Dickens is saying, is the way of the world.
As John Betjeman said in a Daily Telegraph review: ‘Monica Dickens is one of the most affectionate and humorous observers of the English scene, particularly of the pretensions of genteel suburban life, that we have. Not only this, but she can always tell a good story, touch the heart with a pleasant sentimental grace… I think The Winds of Heaven is her best novel yet.’’
While Elizabeth Bowen wrote in Tatler: ‘Monica Dickens has chosen a situation perfectly suited to her art – her sense of comedy, her affection for people and her almost uncanny knowledge of their small ways. Here, in fact, is humour at its most kindly… How well she sees extraordinary in the ordinary, and how familiar she is with all kinds of people… Not a page of The Winds of Heaven is not enjoyable: here’s a fine blend of comedy with sheer good sense.’
Few Eggs and No Oranges by Vera Hodgson
Vere Hodgson worked for a Notting Hill Gate charity during the Second World War; being sparky and unflappable, she was not going to let Hitler make a difference to her life, but the beginning of the Blitz did, which is why she began her published diaries on 25 June 1940: ‘Last night at about 1 a.m. we had the first air raid of the war on London. My room is just opposite the police station, so I got the full benefit of the sirens. It made me leap out of bed…’
The war continued for five more years, but Vere’s comments on her work, friends, what was happening to London and the news (‘We hold our breath over Crete’, ‘There is to be a new system of Warning’) combine to make Few Eggs and No Oranges unusually readable. It is a long – 600 page – book but a deeply engrossing one. The TLS remarked: ‘The diaries capture the sense of living through great events and not being overwhelmed by them… they display an extraordinary – though widespread – capacity for not giving way in the face of horrors and difficulties.’ ‘A classic book that still rings vibrant and helpful today… a heartwarming record of one articulate woman’s coping with the war,’ wrote the Tallahassee Democratic Review.
Miss Ranskill Comes Home by Barbara Euphan Todd
This 1946 novel (by the author of the Worzel Gummidge books) is about a woman who goes on a cruise and is swept overboard; she lives for three years on a desert island before being rescued by a destroyer in 1943. When she returns to England it seems to her to have gone mad: she cannot buy clothes without ‘coupons’, her friends are only interested in ‘war work’, and yet she is considered uncivilised if she walks barefoot or is late for meals. The focus of Barbara Euphan Todd‘s satire is people behaving heroically and appallingly at one and the same time. Rosamond Lehmann considered Miss Ranskill Comes Home ‘a work of great originality, and delightfully readable, a blend of fantasy, satire and romantic comedy… a very entertaining novel and less light than it seems.’ This has been an especial Persephone favourite.
So I'll create a poll for the two upcoming re-reads, but I need your input! Please leave your re-read suggestion in the comments (or message me). You can see what we've already read by going to our homepage and clicking on "bookshelf" and then "read".
Thanks!