The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

August 19, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2011. Originally published 1924. 288 pgs. Purchased.  Evangeline Knapp threw herself into motherhood, obsessively monitoring the food her three children eat and keeping every spec of dirt out of the family’s home. Her eldest son, Henry, is unable to eat foods cooked by his aunt because they don’t match the delicate balance his mother has made to aid his delicate constitution. Her youngest son, Stephen, screams, hid, and is generally considered an unruly child. When […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Feminism, Fiction, North America, Persephone Books, United States • Tags: Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Saplings by Noel Streatfeild

July 17, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2009. Originally published 1945. 377 pgs. Purchased.  In 1939, the four Wiltshire children enjoy an idyllic summer holiday with their parents, a middle-class couple from central London. Their holiday – and, in fact, their comfortable lives – ends with the children being informed that the two oldest, Laurel and Tony, will be sent to boarding school while the two younger children, Kim and Tuesday, will be sent with Nannie to live with their paternal grandparents. […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: Noel Streatfeild

Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg

June 26, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Translated from the Russian by Paul Stevenson and Manya Harari. Persephone Books, 2014. Originally published 1967. 344 pgs. Purchased. In February 1937, a professor, journalist, and proud member of the Communist Party in Kazan named Eugenia Ginzburg was arrested for failing to denounce her fellow professor, Nikolay Naumovich Elvov. Ginzburg, whose non-Latinized name is often spelled as Yevgenia or Evgenia, was accused of participating in Elvov’s counter-revolutionary Trotskyist group through her position on the editorial board of […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Europe, Nonfiction, Persephone Books, Russia, Russian, Translated • Tags: Eugenia Ginzburg

Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski

May 20, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2008. Originally published 1949. 232 pgs. Purchased. In 1940, as the Nazis were marching onto to Paris, an English solider named Hilary Wainwright was forced to abandon his wife and newborn son. His wife, Lisa, was too ill from childbirth for a hasty evacuation back to England; his son, John, seemingly better off in the care of his mother and her friends than a single father. In 1942, the British War Office notified Hilary of […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Adoption, Europe, Fiction, France, Persephone Books • Tags: Marghanita Laski

They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple

April 22, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2005. Originally published 1944. 464 pgs. Purchased. When their mother died of influenza, eighteen-year-old Lucy abandoned her dreams to further her education and returned home to care for her father and siblings, including younger sisters Vera and Charlotte. Their sisterly bond morphed into one where Lucy took on the role of mother – protective, worrying, quick to correct and provide advice – and Vera and Charlotte shared secrets and jokes and excluded Lucy from their […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: Dorothy Whipple

Minnie’s Room by Mollie Panter-Downes

March 22, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 2002. 125 pgs. Purchased. Subtitled “The Peacetime Stories of Mollie Panter-Downes”, this collection of ten short stories presents the realities and dreams of the British people following the end of the World War II. Each story was originally published for the American publication The New Yorker between the years 1947 and 1965, a follow-up of sorts to her short stories from 1938 to 1944. Those wartime stories were published by Persephone Books in 1999 as Good Evening, […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, Short Stories, United Kingdom • Tags: Mollie Panter-Downes

Fidelity by Susan Glaspell

December 26, 2018 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone Books, 1999. Originally published 1913. 358 pgs. Purchased. In 1900, Ruth Holland made the decision to leave her hometown of Freeport to be with the man she was in love with. Her lover, Stuart Williams, was married, and the scandal of Ruth’s actions — because women always carry the blame — divided the small Iowa town and the Holland family. “That part of her life had been cut away from her. With most lives the past […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Feminism, Fiction, Mountain West, North America, Persephone Books, United States • Tags: Susan Glaspell

William — an Englishman by Cicely Hamilton

July 10, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Persephone Books, 2014. Originally published 1919. 226 pgs. Purchased. In 1914, twenty-six year old William Tully, a Social Reformist living in England, marries Griselda the suffragette, and the two sojourn to Belgium for a month long honeymoon. Hoping to take a break from their political activism and enjoy their time together, William and Griselda instruct their friends and family not to write to them or send them English-language newspapers. Neither of them ever considered Europe would end […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, 20BooksofSummer, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: Cicely Hamilton

Cheerful Weather for the Wedding by Julia Strachey

April 4, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — print. Persephone Books, 2009. Originally published 1932. 119 pgs. Purchased. On a March day in England, Dolly Thatcham prepares in her childhood home to marry her fiance, Owen, before the two of them set off for his diplomatic post in South America. The cover image for Strachey’s novel — not to mention the suggestion of “cheerful” in the title — suggests that the day should be serene and wonderful. Yet chaos reigns in the family home. Two cousins […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Fiction, Persephone Books • Tags: Julia Strachey

Because of the Lockwoods by Dorothy Whipple

April 21, 2015 by Christina

Fiction – print. Persephone, 2014. Originally published 1949. 488 pgs. Purchased. Mr. Lockwood is rather peeved when his wife volunteers him to handle the papers of the newly deceased Mr. Hunter, who died unexpectedly leaving behind three children and wife incapable of balancing a checkbook let alone her husband’s affairs. And he is even further peeved to find that Mr. Hunter recently purchased a paddock abutting Lockwood’s property he had spent years trying to acquire with the three hundred pounds […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Chunkster, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: Dorothy Whipple

Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple

November 22, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. Persephone Books, 2008. Originally published 1953. 413 pgs. Library copy. Whipple’s novel follows an English family as they grapple with the impact a young, French woman has on their lives. Avery owns his own publishing house in London but lives outside the city with his wife, Ellen, near the home of his demanding mother, known only as Mrs. North or Madame. Their daughter, Anne, attends a boarding school away from her family and her beloved horse, Roma, […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Classics, Europe, Fiction, France, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: Dorothy Whipple

Good Evening, Mrs. Craven by Mollie Panter-Downes

September 18, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. Persephone Books, 2008. 200 pgs. Library copy. Panter-Downes served as the London correspondent for The New Yorker during the Second World War writing the “Letter from London” column, book reviews, and over thirty short stories about English domestic life. This collection – the first for Panter-Downes – contains twenty-one of her short stories and spans the years 1938 to 1944. The titular story follows a young woman engaged in an affair with a Mr. Craven – the […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Europe, Fiction, Persephone Books, United Kingdom • Tags: Mollie Panter-Downes