Persephone Books discussion

Hi everyone-
The poll is up for our Jan/Feb books! Here's a description of each, from the Persephone website. The poll will close at midnight on Saturday the 6th.

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.

Farewell Leicester Square by Betty Miller –
Betty Miller wrote this, her fourth novel, in 1935. But her publisher, Victor Gollancz, 'turned the book down flat,' wrote Neal Ascherson in The New York Review of Books. 'It seems most likely that he saw it as terrifyingly provocative, not only an attack on the solid English assimilation of his own family but a tactless outburst against the English at precisely the moment, two years after Hitler's assumption of power, when their tolerance and hospitality were most needed.'
In the novel Alec Berman escapes from his restrictive Jewish family in Brighton, and although he has a successful career as a film-maker (perhaps modelled on that of Alexander Korda) and marries the very English Catherine, he always feels a 'Dago: Jew: Outsider.' 'Yet,' continued Neal Ascherson, 'the rejection is not really the refusal of a snobbish Gentile world fully to accept him. The rejecting force comes from within himself.' 'A thought-provoking insight into anti-semitism between the wars,' wrote the Guardian, 'not the violent prejudice of Mosley's fascists, but the discreet discrimination of the bourgeoisie.'

Every Eye by Isobel English –
Isobel English, the pseudonym of June Braybrooke (1920-94), wrote little but what she published was of outstanding quality. 'Sometimes, but not often, a novel comes along which makes the rest of what one has to review seem commonplace. Such a novel is Every Eye,' John Betjeman said in the Daily Telegraph on its first publication.
This 1956 novel is about a girl growing up to what could have been unhappiness but for her marriage to a carefree young(er) man. As she travels south by train to Ibiza she surveys her past life and unravels a mystery. Hence The Tablet's comment: 'This novel is a marvellous discovery. You will want to reread it immediately in the light of its astonishing final paragraph.' Muriel Spark wrote: 'The late Isobel English was an exceptionally talented young novelist of the mid-1950s. Every Eye is one of her most successful and sensitively written books, a romantic yet unsentimental story of a young woman's intricate relationships of family and love, intensely evocative of the period, remarkable in its observations of place and character.' And Anita Brookner called Every Eye 'a lucidly written account of various kinds of confusion and a valuable lesson in where to look for freedom.'

A Woman’s Place: 1910-75 by Ruth Adam
This is, we believe, the most readable overview of twentieth century women's lives yet written, covering everything Persephone readers might want to know about the suffragettes, early 'type-writers', contraception or work in wartime; and it complements our other books by exploring factually what they, indirectly, explore in fiction.
A Woman's Place 1910-75 was written twenty-five years ago by a novelist historian and is both human and humane, wise and cynical, polemical and witty. It concludes, wearily: 'A woman born at the turn of the century could have lived through two periods when it was her moral duty to devote herself, obsessively, to her children; three when it was her duty to society to neglect them; two when it was right to be seductively ''feminine''; and three when it was a pressing social obligation to be the reverse.'

OK, the results are in! We had a three-way tie, so I'll just schedule these for the next 3 months.
January - Few Eggs and No Oranges
February - Farewell Leicester Square
March - A Woman's Place: 1910-1975

The book we have scheduled for January, Few Eggs and No Oranges, is currently reprinting. I contacted Persephone, and they said it should be ready in December. We'll see if that happens--if not, we can switch some of the books around!

All right, Few Eggs and No Oranges is now available from Persephone's website. A Woman's Place is scheduled for March, and it's reprinting right now. I was told it would be available at the end of January, so the timing should work out!

When does Few Eggs and No Oranges have to be finished? Carol

Usually, we discuss it close to the end of the month, so you can read it during the month of January and we'll start the discussion at the end of January/beginning of February.

Thank. Have a good holiday. Carol