Persephone Books – Ramblings on my bookshelves

The second of the three Persephone books that I purchased from them at their own shop in Bath back in September this year. The first one I featured was ‘To Bed With Grand Music’ by Marghanita Laski which was also in their distinctive all grey binding and dust jacket. Persephone specialise in twentieth century female writers a large number of which have largely been forgotten nowadays, certainly I had never heard of Diana Tutton before buying this book. It turns out that this was Tutton’s second novel, but the first to be published, back in 1953 by Chatto and Windus, she would go on to write one more novel whilst living in Malaya in the early 1950’s before returning to the UK with her husband and apparently retiring from writing as I can find no other works by her other than these three novels. Guard your Daughters was easily her biggest hit and largely favourably reviewed at the time including by such literary luminaries as the future Poet Laureate John Betjeman who described it as ‘A really talented first novel’ in his review in the Daily Telegraph newspaper. Persephone Books have rather unusually included an afterword made up of contemporary reviews up to modern day blogs, I have to say that the more modern takes on the novel are nowhere near as complimentary as the reviews from the 1950’s and that I have to agree with them. Whatever ‘charm’ the book had when it first appeared has largely evaporated over the decades and I took weeks to read it despite it only being 250 pages long, picking up other books to read and review whenever I got totally fed up with the five Harvey sisters, their tedious father and their awful mother.

The father is apparently a famous mystery novelist although the pseudonym that he writes under is never mentioned and he spends most of his time in his study composing the books that have made him wealthy occasionally appearing to eat and in the evenings drink sherry before vanishing again to his room. The mother spends most of her time taking to her bed following whatever perceived slight she has objected to most recently and controlling her daughters to an obsessive degree so that none of them have ever been to school and are largely kept from any form of socialising, being effectively confined to the house except when needed to go on errands. As the book starts the eldest, Pandora, has escaped the oppressive atmosphere of the house by somehow getting married leaving behind her four sisters, in order of age, Thisbe, our narrator Morgan, Cressida and finally Teresa who is fifteen. The names are as pretentious as the girls are snobbish, seeing themselves as special because of their father and charmingly eccentric due to their odd existence cut off from the modern world without formal education, social life, telephone, or car rather than bizarre. The writing is all over the place as well with most things described in the present tense but then all of a sudden near the end of the book it’s Morgan looking back over the years at what had happened. Morgan is also not an interesting narrator which is another reason I kept putting the book down, frankly I didn’t care what these young women were doing in their extremely odd household where their mother did nothing other than flower arranging and having nervous collapses, leaving all the household duties to the girls, which are tediously described, and the one remaining servant who was mainly a cleaning lady as far as I could tell from her random appearances.

The girls attempts to add male company and presumably an escape from the house as Pandora managed are thwarted by the controlling interests of their parents but near the end of the book it looks like finally they may be set free. According to the Persephone Books website there was going to be a sequel where they did lead their own lives but this was unfinished. Frankly I’m happy Tutton never completed it, presumably she got as fed up with the Harvey sisters as I did.

Diana Tutton wrote a sequel in the late 1950s which, alas, was never published. It was called Unguarded Moments and its setting is London seven years after Mrs Harvey had a total breakdown and all the girls moved out: to freedom and their own lives. Morgan has married and had two children. In this novel, too, there is a dark side: one of her children disappears and is not found for a heart-stopping few hours.
Persephone Books website – see here

I will probably give this book away rather than find a home for it on the shelves as I’m unlikely to want to read it again, pity as I enjoyed Laski’s work and am really looking forward to the third book I bought in Bath which will be tackled sometime in the new year. As with the Laski there are patterned endpapers with a matching bookmark, this time it is taken from a 1953 printed cotton by Susie Cooper for Cavendish Textiles.

At the end of September I visited the city of Bath in Somerset, England and there found the headquarters of Persephone Books, a small publishing company specialising in the works of various female authors from the twentieth century. They started twenty five years ago in 1998 and all their books are bound in this silver/grey design with an identical dust wrapper but the end papers are different in each book and you also get a bookmark which matches that volumes’ end papers. Also each book, regardless of length, is priced at £14 but with a deal of any three books for £36. Restricting myself to three from the one hundred and forty nine titles available was tricky but at least from this book, number 86 on their list, I seem to have chosen well. It was originally printed in 1946 with the author taking the pseudonym of Sarah Russell almost certainly due to the scandalous nature of the subject matter. For Mrs Deborah Robertson says goodbye to her husband Graham in the early part of of the war as he is posted to Egypt and after moping about at their marital home in the country for a while with their young son Timmy, leaves him in charge of the housekeeper during the week and gets a job in London to keep herself occupied and starts on a series of affairs.

In fact the first ‘affair’ would nowadays be regarded as rape as the man involved got her drunk and they ended up in bed together for what was definitely a one off occasion which Deborah was completely disgusted with. However she soon moves in with a friend and starts relationships deliberately this time, partly for the company but mainly for what she can get out of them and she does seem to do rather well for quite a long time. The first proper affair was with Joe, an American lieutenant with a wife back in the States and this lasted quite a while with Deborah even taking him back to her marital home for what turned out to be an uncomfortable weekend to meet Timmy and this relationship lasted until he was posted out of the UK. He is followed by another American lieutenant called Sheldon who didn’t last very long before she found a French member of the London embassy called Pierre. This is the time when Deborah decides that what she really wants is to be a ‘professional mistress’ and asks Pierre to teach her what men are looking for is their dalliances. Pierre agrees but is also repelled by the task so after a few more weeks takes her for a meal with Brazilian diplomat Luis Vardas and after enjoying the meal simply leaves her with him as her new partner. By the end of affair number six she is completely manipulative over her lovers as can be told from the below extract when she has decided to get rid of her first British lover Anthony.

After Anthony we no longer have a lover by lover account of her partners instead there is a succession of men about who we find out very little and presumably neither does Deborah, she simply sees them as a means to an end although she is by now overspending in order to keep up the appearances needed for the class of man she is aiming to attract. Chapter ten begins…

Geoffrey was succeeded by Martin and Martin by Nils from the Norwegian Navy. Usually Deborah managed to avoid any awkward interregnum by building one up before the last had faded away, but sometimes this would fail and a gap would yawn. Then Deborah would give a party.

At such a party she would invite several possible successors for her favours and pick one to work on. By now Deborah is thoroughly unlikable as a character but the book is written so well that it is difficult to put down. Laski was a lover of words and the novel is beautifully put together so even as the ‘only in it for herself’ nature of Deborah becomes more and more dominant the novel still draws the reader in. Laski wrote six novels, five of which have been published by Persephone Books but her love of words is mainly shown by the fact that she contributed over a quarter of a million illustrative quotations to the Oxford English Dictionary and was also a regular panellist for twelve years on the BBC game show ‘What’s My Line’. I’ve loved the book and will almost certainly pick one of her other novels in my next group of three Persephone publications.

The end papers and the bookmark are printed with a design entitled ‘Good Night Everybody’, from a silk scarf made by London based silk specialist Jacqmar around 1940 and held in a private collection.