A fantastic book! The author uses many fascinating novels to explore her main themes about the writing of fiction by and for women in the years 1914-1939. Her descriptions and analyses of these books are very interesting. Many of them are very hard to find so it is a boon to have this information supplied so well. ( )

Originally published by Virago in 1983, A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914-1939 is a fantastic overview of the woman’s novel in the interwar years (interesting that “woman” is in the singular, not plural, here). The book is divided not chronologically but by theme, covering such diverse topics as War, Spinsters (ie, Surplus Women), Love, and Sex. Beauman draws from some of the popular middlebrow women writers of the period, many of whom were later revived by Persephone and Virago. These are the writers that the average woman of the period would have borrowed from Mudie’s or Boots, and the authors of these books dealt with their topics in a way that were accessible to their readers.

This is a well-researched and perceptive overview of women writers and their novels between the years of 1914 and 1939, with an afterword by Beauman that was written in 1995 in which she mentions what she might have done differently in the book. The book highlight a number of women writers that many people today haven’t heard of, yet were widely read when their novels were published. It’s interesting to read about how Beauman wrote the book; she only wrote about the books she truly enjoyed, which was reflected much later when she started Persephone. It’s amazing how many of these novels are out of print or hard to find; when Beauman was researching this book, she had to use her resources in order to track them down (no internet at the time, and she couldn’t get into the British Museum reading room because she shad small children!) Also interesting how, until Persephone reprinted William, by Cicely Hamilton, there was only one copy of it available that she could find). As the author says, “nearly everyone has a cherished list of novels that have never been reprinted and they ‘can’t understand why.’” Beauman’s list, predictably, includes many novelists that she was later to revive with Persephone.

This is the kind of book that complements perfectly the other books on the Persephone list, and those reprinted by Virago. I was interested in what Beauman has to say specifically about the books themselves; but equally interesting is what she has to say about women’s lives in general during this time period. I think she assumes that her reader is familiar with the history of the period, but since I am, that personally didn’t bother me. The book isn’t particularly academic, though. I can’t wait to track down some of the books that Beaumen mentions in this book, since they all sound so good. ( )

An exhaustive and well researched history of women's writing during the interwar period, focusing on the middlebrow, realist tradition (as opposed to the avant-garde). The chapters on sex and romance are the most interesting ones, especially the extracts from the romance novels of the period (a weird mixture of high flown moral language and sadomasochistic sexuality). ( )

Bought 14 Apr 2009 from the Persephone shop on Lambs Conduit St with token from Bridget

How fortuitous that this lovely, wallowy book should come to the top of Mt TBR just when I was in solitary confinement and needed something lovely and wallowy to read! It also brought back memories of my lovely day trip to London with Ali for Persephone buying purposes, at Easter.

Taking me straight back to my University days in the late 80s/early 90s when reclaiming women writers was the big thing and my Women's Lit tutor, Peggy Reynolds, was busy on about Aphra Benn etc, this is a survey of women's writing between WW1 and WW2. Taking themes such as love, sex, psychoanalysis, it looks at these themes in the books which became the mainstay of Beauman's Persephone Books publishing efforts so many years later. I've read a fair proportion of the books mentioned, which made it a joy to read with that thrill of recognition - oh, is she going to include x by y in this section...? True to women's studies, herstory etc, Beauman puts enough of herself and her foremothers in to make it recognisable but not unprofessional. And in the excellent Afterword to the 1995 edition, not only does she foreshadow her own publishing programme, but also takes issue with the over-feminist theorists of the times between the editions and the critical reaction - which pleased me as, although studying some of this stuff in academia, it always seemed to me to miss the point slightly.

So, a good workwomanlike survey, a lovely reclaiming, and a look at how far we've come, both in terms of the beginnings of the liberation of women from their proscribed lives at the end of WW1 to their flowering freedoms in the 1930s, and in terms of the liberation of many of these excellent novels and novelists from languishing in the dusty realms of the out of print list into the fresh, lovely green and grey of Virago and Persephone reprints. ( )