A Very Great Profession

by Nicola Beauman

A Very Great Profession, first published in 1983, looks at women like Katharine 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 illuminate 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Books About Books, Literary Criticism, History, Literature, Feminism, Academic

398 pages, Paperback

First published May 9, 1983

About the author

Nicola Beauman is a British biographer and journalist, and the founder of Persephone Books, an independent book publisher based in Bath.

Reviews

[Tania · Rating 4 out of 5]

I now want to read most of the novels in this book, and re-read the ones I've already read.

[Mirte · Rating 4 out of 5]

"This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room." Virginia Woolf says in A Room of One's Own. Nicola Beauman proves, once and for all, that these so-called insignificant books are by no means inferior to their counterparts written by male authors andin fact chronicle the position of middle-class women throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

This is the first book I read for my research on Persephone Books and its plethora of unexplored women writers, and I am glad I picked this one to be the first. Beauman founded Persephone Books several years after A Very Great Profession was finished, and it was quite enlightening to see where she was coming from. Other than that, reading about her own research and drive strongly motivated me, giving me a sense of purpose, of perhaps continuing the work into the 21st century.

Possibly due to Beauman's isolation from academia, her prose is clear and understandable, which means reading this is quite easy, despite the pages being packed with information and sharp observations.

The division into themes is functional, though some themes seem to overlap at certain points, resulting in an incidentally repeated conclusion. However, the whole is an enormously informative book on female novelists in the inter-war period; the connection of their fiction to the real-life situation of the average housewife makes reading the excerpt and quotes the more interesting and moving. The historical background is enlightening and will very likely improve my reading experience when trying my hand at the long list of to-read novels I took away from this book.

Any fan of Persephone Books will find this an invaluable companion book. Anyone unfamiliar with the Persephone Books catalogue, but willing to give it a try, this might be a good place to start for a little background to the gems you're about to read.

[Bronwyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this! A book about books, what’s not to enjoy? And about women writers and not well known ones... it’s excellent. I’ve added so many books to my various wish lists too! So many are available free online, and others are put out by amazing companies like Virago and Persephone (I wonder why? ;) )

I loved how the book chapters were each on a theme, and I was able to read most chapters in just a few days. The themes are what caused me to stall out for so long though - I just wasn’t interested in the psychoanalysis chapter. I’m sure other people enjoyed that one though, so, nothing against the book in that regard. My favorites were probably the chapters on feminism and love and romance; Beauman’s afterword was really interesting too - I loved the reflection on how the book was written and what she thinks of it after many years.

[kymdotcom · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was all panicked about not being able to get copies of the books mentioned by the author, and then I realised that Persephone publishes most of them. So win.

[Starfish · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd only really considered the woman writers of the inter-war years in terms of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction -- Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and the fourth one, whose name I can't remember (Margery Allingham?). None of them feature in this book, so I found it a really useful counterbalance to my already existing views.

It's also really nice to see Katharine Mansfield in a context other than a 'New Zealander' or 'New Zealander abroad' setting -- she's used just as every other woman author the author uses, and I like her better for it.

Basically, however, this book looks at what woman in the Inter-War period's were interested in, what their lives were like and what they wrote and read. I've now got a good number of books and authors I want to investigate. The author's style is very engaging although it sits somewhat awkwardly between popular and literary approaches -- something like its subject matter does. It's somewhat disconcerting to realise how little the issues surrounding popular fiction have changed in the last century or so. I've seen someone tag this book with 'snooty' which I feel is totally undeserved -- the author frankly admits that she chose to include books solely on the basis of whether she liked them, and her backword describes the writing process without any pretences. Unless by 'snooty' she means 'author knows what she is talking about' which I agree with, so.

[lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It is only when women are certain of an overall female audience that they are free to explore one of the most basic of female occupations — the reconciliation and connections of the everyday with the issues which society defines as broader and more important."

[Laurie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rounded up to 3.5 stars - As a lifelong Anglophile, I was excited to read about English women authors and the novels they wrote from the beginning of the first world war to the beginning of the second. So much changed for society as a whole and for women because of WWI and because of advances in technology such as the wireless radio, automobiles, and labor saving devices for the home. The servant class largely disappeared as a result of the war, so upper class women had a harder time finding help and middle class women had to manage their own households without help at all. Women who would never have dreamed of working outside the home before the war found jobs in various low paying professions.

These and many other changes in society are reflected in novels from this time period. Women authors finally wrote about women who had an interest in sex and who had interests other than staying home painting and sewing and visiting with other society women every day. The leisurely world of Jane Austen and George Eliot's main characters was gone for good except for the extremely wealthy. The novels analyzed in this book more accurately represent the lives of women that we can relate to now. But the lives of many of the characters are not happy lives. They had more responsibility than Victorian women to work and raise their children rather than servants performing those functions. They were still constrained by society's expectations to get married and to be subordinate in their marriage. The women in novels from this era began to question their role as wives and mothers as never before. The ideas of feminism began to be an actual theme in some novels.

Beauman's analysis of various themes are fascinating but it became somewhat bogged down by many long quotes from various novels. She could have made her points equally well without resorting to including a plethora of lengthy direct quotes which began to feel like padding. Nevertheless I hadn't heard of all of the authors mentioned so now I have more new authors to explore now.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, and I read it with a notebook and pen at the ready, so that I could take note of authors I had never heard of before.

The book examines women's fiction, or fiction about women's lives, in the UK between the two world wars. The author states that fiction describing the daily lives of women has been neglected or considered less important than the classical "male" type of novel dealing with war, anger and the like. So she set out to correct this, both by publishing this systematic study of the woman's novel between the war, and founding Persephone press, which reprints such novels.

This premise, that the daily lives of women are fertile ground for novelistic interpretation, and that a critical review of such novels is a worthy literary endeavor, is one that I wholeheartedly agree with. And so I enjoyed the book. I especially liked the organization by chapters on specific themes like "War", "Feminism", "Romance". That made a lot of sense to me.

Perhaps the best way to evaluate the success/impact of a book like this, is whether it inspires the reader to read the novelists mentioned. By that measure, this book had a big impact on me. Not only has it encouraged me to read Virginia Woolf (an author I'd always avoided because stream-of-consciousness writing is not my favorite style) , but it's provided me with pages full of names and titles to check out. Onward to the library!

[Rosemary · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book for Persephone fans. Nicola Beauman is the founder of Persephone Books, and although this was first published in the 1980s, it covers many of the authors and even some of the specific books that she later reissued in dove-grey covers. It considers women writing (and writing for women) during the First World War and between the wars, including many writers who are forgotten today and covering popular fiction such as the romances of Ethel M. Dell and Ruby M. Ayres as well as the obvious writers like Virginia Woolf and Rosamond Lehmann. It may not be ground-breaking literary criticism but it's an interesting read for those of us who love the 'woman's novel' of that period.

[VG · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very comprehensive look at female writers, arranged thematically, focusing particularly on the inter-war years of the twentieth century. My biggest criticism was the level of spoilers - I felt that many of the points made in reference to particular books could have been argued without detailed descriptions of the endings. Luckily, as an avid Persephone Books fan, I had read a number of the stories mentioned already, but there were others that I have not, and found myself trying to remember to skip whole paragraphs to avoid ruining them. If you are already well-versed in the Persephone back catalogue, this is an excellent accompaniment; if not, keep this on the back-burner until then.

[drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Very Great Profession is sort of the bible for my publishing dissertation!! I learnt so much about early 20th century literature and added so many novels to my reading list for the future. It is really inspiring to see how Beauman went from gushing about these titles to starting her own publishing company to give them new life.

[Bryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This blew my mind when I first encountered it in the early 00s, and I've read it a few times since then, so it is interesting to come back to now -- it looks very different to me in my late 40s than it did in my mid-20s! Some of what strikes me now is how much of its moment (1983) Beauman's feminism is; she starts off with a lot of assumptions both about what women want & what things are important, but since I don't share her assumptions I have a difficult time with the places she ends up. She seems to believe that the only possible meaningful life is in productive work and the public sphere, so a woman who is a homemaker or engages mostly in emotional labour or other kinds of relatonal work is living an 'empty useless life,' and thus that's how she reads a lot of older fiction -- even if the women in it seem to be happy, they're obviously miserable, and what really matters is that people refuse duty and self-sacrifice to fulfill themselves individually. I see where she's coming from, but as someone who chose to be a homemaker and finds it fulfilling, I wish Beauman had realised that there is no One True Way to be a woman or live a woman's life! I am glad to have revisited this one last time, but I am not sure I need to read it again -- it opened up a lot of doors for me back when, but right now it doesn't have a lot to offer.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

By the founder of Persephone Books in London, this labour of love describes what women authors in the inter-war period were writing about and as such is a view of very post-Pankhurst feminism in the UK. I learnt the term "Aga saga" and can't wait to read more of them. Persephone is a publisher to work through, possibly in quiet moments when the kids have gone off to boarding school, the kitchen has been tidied after a roast, and the Aga is still warm.
I need to build a new shelf for these books.

[Susan Daly · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting survey of women's popular fiction and how it both reflected and influenced the lives of women in Britain from 1914 to 1939.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

So inspiring that I based a whole month’s worth of blog posts around it in April! Also invaluable for my MA and PhD research.

[The reader in the haar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thematic study of interwar women writers. Fun and easy read.

[Christine PNW · Rating 5 out of 5]

My TBR has further exploded.

I bought a print copy of this book for my shelves, and I anticipate returning to it again and again over the years.

[JimZ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicola Beauman originally wrote this in 1983 and it was published by Virago. Then she founded Persephone Books and this book has been re-issued under that imprint in 1995 (with a new Afterword) and reprinted again in 2008. I love love love Persephone Books. Rarely a dud amongst their re-issues, let me tell you!

And I enjoyed reading this volume quite a bit ... I thought she did a really nice job in managing to talk about a ton of authors in a coherent easy-to-follow manner. She had eight chapters each on a theme and she would discuss authors and partial books of the authors that fit that theme: War; Surplus Women; Feminism; Domesticity; Sex; Psychoanalysis; Romance; and Love. I recognized many of the authors and had read a fair number of books discussed or listed in this book. But I am glad to say that she introduced me to books I have not read but will now seek out, because her descriptions of different books piqued my interest. For one, the diaries and letters of Virgina Woolf. She said they are NOT like Woolf’s works of fiction. Here is what she says:
• ...her letters and diaries are among the great documents of the century; few other women, except perhaps Anais Nin and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, have kept such a detailed and absorbing record of their day-to-day existence.

She has a nice section at the end of the book that gives brief summaries of the different authors discussed in the book, quite often including one or more books that she and/or others considered the author’s outstanding works.

I would especially recommend this book to those fans of Virago Modern Classics and/or Persephone Books. For those who have not yet delved into the forgotten works by female authors re-issued by Virago and Persephone, this volume by Beauman would serve as an excellent starting point for recommendations on what books to consider reading.

Reviews:
• I am in complete agreement with heavenali’s review here (we are in synch actually!)... https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2020/...
• https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2...
• https://agirlwalksintoabookstore.blog...
• https://chasingbawa.com/2010/12/26/a-...

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very interesting look at books written by women early in the last century. These include some of my favorite overlooked British authors. A great resource for those of us who enjoy the “middlebrow” authors, and thanks to Beauman for all she has done to keep these books alive and available.

[Lisa of Hopewell]

I learned of this book here:
https://heavenali.wordpress.com/2020/...

[Mills College Library]

823 B378 2008