Nicola Beauman

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Nicola Beauman Hon. FRSL (née Mann, born 20 June 1944)[1] is a British biographer and journalist, and the founder of Persephone Books, an independent book publisher based in Bath.

Early life[edit]

Beauman was born in London. She attended St Paul's Girls' School and Newnham College, Cambridge.[2]

Career[edit]

Beauman brought attention to middle-class women writers with her 1983 survey A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel, 1914–39.[3] Her research showed how literary representations of female domesticity could challenge those social assumptions.[4] Much of Beauman's later writing has been literary biography. In 2022, Beauman was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[5]

Persephone Books[edit]

Main article: Persephone Books

Beauman's Persephone Books is a publishing house that mainly publishes female authors. It was founded in 1998[2] as a mail-order publisher,[6] and sales are mostly made online. In May 2021 the company's retail shop moved from Bloomsbury in London to Bath.[7]

According to The Guardian, Beauman founded Persephone Books to publish 'forgotten' novels by women, many of which she had written about in, A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914-39, originally published by Virago in 1983 and reissued in 2008 by Persephone Books.[8] The books all come in a uniform grey cover, which Beauman sees as 'a guarantee of a good read',[9] and contain endpapers that use patterns or prints from the year the book was first published.[6]

In an interview with journalist Leonie Cooper, Beauman said that when she first started the press things were hard: "We had a lot of books piling up in the warehouse, but then we got a bestseller, which was phenomenally lucky."[10] That bestseller was Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson, which Persephone Books published in 2000 and which has been made into a film starring Frances McDormand.[11] Since then Persephone Books has continued to publish several books a year, and currently has 147 titles in print, including novels by Dorothy Whipple, Virginia Woolf, R. C. Sherriff, Katherine Mansfield, and E. M. Delafield.[12]

Publications[edit]

  • A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel, 1914–39, Virago (London), 1983.
  • Cynthia Asquith (biography), Hamilton (London), 1987.
  • Morgan: A Biography of the Novelist E. M. Forster, Hodder and Stoughton (London), 1993, Knopf (New York), 1994.
  • The Other Elizabeth Taylor, Persephone (London, England), 1993.

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Contemporary Authors Online". Biography in Context. Gale. 2014. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
  2. ^ a b "People of Today". Biography in Context. Gale. 2011. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
  3. ^ Brown, Erica (July 2008). "Middlebrow". Working Papers on the Web. 11. Retrieved 27 April 2021.
  4. ^ "Nicola Beauman". Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors. Gale. 28 February 2014. Retrieved 27 April 2021.
  5. ^ "Nicola Beauman". Royal Society of Literature. Retrieved 9 May 2023.
  6. ^ a b Lyall, Sarah (15 April 2019). "Shelf Space for the Unsung Female Writer". New York Times. Gale. Retrieved 27 April 2021.
  7. ^ "Our Shop". Persephone Books. Retrieved 9 May 2021.
  8. ^ Cooke, Rachel (24 November 2012). "One shade of grey: how Nicola Beauman made an unlikely success of Persephone Books". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
  9. ^ "About Us". www.persephonebooks.co.uk. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
  10. ^ Cooper, Leonie (8 February 2008). "Books lost and found". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
  11. ^ "'I am doing it for the books'". Financial Times. 19 May 2008. Retrieved 9 May 2023.
  12. ^ "Book List".
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