Fictional Persephone Readers

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Fictional Persephone Readers

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1Kasthu
Mag 8, 2011, 11:08 am

There's a thread like this in the Virago group, so I thought it would be fun to see which characters in fiction read Persephone authors.

From Diary of a Provincial Lady (by a Persephone author):

"Ella Wheelwright joins us. She now has on a black ensemble, and hair done in quite a new way--and we talk about books. I say that i have enjoyed nothing so much as Flush, but Miss Paterson again disconcerts me by muttering that to write a whole book about a dog is Simply Morbid."

2Kasthu
Mag 8, 2011, 11:12 am

Also from The Diary of a Provincial Lady:

"...What, I enquire in order to gain time, does Mrs. Peacock like in the way of books?

In times such as these, she replies very apologetically indeed, she thinks a novel is practically the only thing. Not a detective novel, not a novel about politics, nor about the unemployed, nothing to do with sex, and above all not a novel about life under Nazi regime in Germany.

Inspiration immediately descends upon me and i tell her without hesitation to read a delightful novel called The Priory by Dorothy Whipple, which answers all requirements, and has a happy ending into the bargain."

3bleuroses
Mag 8, 2011, 5:57 pm

Excellent! Thanks for continuing the fun here Katherine!

4elkiedee
Giu 27, 2011, 10:55 am

I'm reading The Novel in the Viola by Natasha Solomons - Elise is an Austrian Jewish refugee, and the novel is set in 1939/40 and in one passage she mentions reading all the romances: Miss Buncle's Book and Cheerful Weather for the Wedding and a third one too. Clearly Ms Solomons is a regular Persephone reader herself.

5Kasthu
Modificato: Gen 13, 2012, 7:50 pm

"Then Diana Athill phoned--she's Andre's partner--to say there's a Deutsch company lunch for me on Friday..." (p. 92)

"I'd just read Judith Viorst's It's Hard to be Hip Over Thirty. I was certain Andre would publish it if he read it, and when I set the breakfast table I put the book above his plate... he broke off in mid-sentence, pointed to the book, said: 'I read that, darling, it won't travel,' and went on with the story." (p. 170).

(From Q's Legacy, by Helene Hanff)

6kaggsy
Feb 4, 2013, 2:05 pm

Not exactly a novel, but the great Dorothy Whipple gets a namecheck in Andrew Martin's book Underground, Overground:

"In a novel by Dorothy Whipple called High Wages, which was published in 1930 but set in the Edwardian period, young Jane Carter arrives at Euston station from the fictional Lancastrian town of Tidsley. Iris her first visit to London. She steps onto the Euston Road and takes in the scene/ Not beautiful certainly, but how exciting! What cars, what buses, what bicycles, what horses — and what was that running with a roar under a grating?'

The roar under the grating was the Metropolitan Railway, currently trading — in somewhat reduced circumstances — as the Metropolitan Line of the London Underground."

7booktruffler
Feb 8, 2013, 12:28 am

elkiedee, I read that too, and meant to post about it. I rather liked TNITV, though the novel itself was so anti-climactic.