In the grand but comfortable surroundings of the National Liberal Club in Whitehall, around thirty members and guests gathered on 21st September to enjoy a delicious three course lunch and to meet our new President, Baroness Floella Benjamin, for the first time.
After a welcome from our chairman Barbara Field-Holmes, Floella took to the microphone with a short but inspiring speech in which she paid tribute to the SWWJ as an all-embracing and forward thinking society. Words are powerful, she said. They can change people’s lives, embrace all colours and backgrounds, and make people feel they belong. Having recently judged a children’s writing competition, she was impressed by the imagination, quality and freedom in the many entries from young girls, and feels that the writing of the future is in very good hands, but that it is up to us to pave the way for them. As our new President, she is very much looking forward to being part of that journey.
After our meal, Pamela Payne introduced our speaker for the afternoon, Nicola Beauman. Nicola gave us a brief overview of her experiences as a young woman at Cambridge in the 1970s and her growing interest in the many unsung and unappreciated women writers of the past. Women’s fiction was not being read and was not represented on the curriculum and, when she decided to write a book about women writers, she was told she couldn’t ‘because they aren’t any’!
After receiving a crushing report from a publisher’s reader for her first three chapters, Nicola abandoned her book for many years in favour of the expected path for a woman – marriage and children. In 1998 she decided to found her own publishing company, specialising in reprints of books by women writers, mostly from the interwar years, and Persephone Books was born in a small basement office. She published 12 books in the first year, but sales were slow as nobody had heard of the company and newspapers refused to review reprinted books, so Nicola made the move to mail order, took a stand at Country Living, moved to shop premises, and slowly began to build her business. The company now has 125 books to its name, three staff, and an annual turnover of £500,000. There are monthly book groups, free catalogues, and a twice yearly magazine. Find out more at: www.persephonebooks.co.uk. You can read the full report of the event and more from both speeches in the forthcoming Autumn issue of The Woman Writer.
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