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A Very Great Profession, first published in 1983, looks at women like Katherine in Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (‘Katharine, thus, was a member of a very great profession which has, as yet, no title and very little recognition… She lived at home’) and Laura, the heroine of Brief Encounter, women whose lives and habits were wonderfully recorded in the fiction of the time.  Drawing on the novels to illuminates themes such as domestic life, romantic love, sex, psychoanalysis, the Great War and ‘surplus’ women, A Very Great Profession uses the work of numerous women writers to present a portrait, though their fiction, of middle-class Englishwomen in the period between the wars.

'One of the most compelling and perceptive books of informal literary criticism ever produced,’ wrote the critic Elizabeth Young when A Very Great Profession was first reprinted.  She went on: ‘Ranging through a variety of themes, Nicola Beauman examines their effects upon the characters created by authors as diverse as Virginia Woolf, EM Delafield and Elinor Glyn.  An astute critic, she produces an unforgettable picture of the lives of middle-class women during this period.'

Persephone prints mainly neglected fiction and non-fiction by women, for women and about women. The titles are chosen to appeal to busy women who rarely have time to spend in ever-larger bookshops and who would like to have access to a list of books designed to be neither too literary nor too commercial. The books are guaranteed to be readable, thought-provoking and impossible to forget. We sell mainly through mail order, through selected shops and we have our own shop.

59 Lamb's Conduit Street, WC1N 3NB

(nearest tube stations Russell Square and Holborn). Here is a map of where we are.

Our titles include novels, short stories, diaries and cookery books. They are all carefully designed with a clear typeface, a dove-grey jacket, a 'fabric' endpaper and bookmark, and a preface by writers such as Jilly Cooper, Adam Gopnik, and Jacqueline Wilson.

'The answer to a present-giver's prayers.' Vogue

'There are cute books, there are beautiful books and then there are Persephone books.' The Irish Times

'What unites all the books is their timelessness. The writing is fresh, psychologically accurate, frequently moving and funny.' Daily Telegraph

'Oh, the bliss of Persephone Books!' India Knight, The Shops

Why Persephone

We chose the name Persephone because it has a timeless quality; sounds beautiful; is very obviously feminine; and symbolises new beginnings (and fertility) as well as female creativity.

We did not at first realise that Persephone also symbolises many other aspects of women's lives, for example, less cheerfully, she represents married hell (being raped and imprisoned by her uncle Hades).

But mainly she is an image of women's creativity, and that is why our logo, based on a painting on a Greek amphora, shows a woman who is not only reading (the scroll) but also symbolises domesticity (the goose). She is not the goddess herself, but we preferred her to all other extant images of Persephone as well as to her own symbols - a daffodil, a lily, a pomegranate and a bat.

Design and Endpapers

We have given much thought not only to the choice of titles we will publish but also to 'what women want'. Our books look beautiful because we believe that, whether they are on an office desk, by the Aga, or hanging in a bag over the handles of a buggy, it is important to get pleasure from how they look and feel.

With their distinctive plain grey jackets and cream 'labels' for the title wording, all our books look the same from the outside.

Inside, each is different, with the endpapers chosen especially to match the date and mood of the book.

Fabrics are as much a part of our daily lives as furnishing and dress materials, yet we rarely see them used in any other context. However, fabric design should be celebrated for its own sake; and because it is a field in which women designers have been particularly prominent we would like to use their work whenever possible.