Persephone book

First published in 1948, this is the story of two families during the inter-war years. We are shown the matriarchs around whom their families spin; but whether they direct their children gently or forcefully, in the end they have to accept them as they are. We see that families can both entrap and sustain; that parents and children must respect each other; and that happiness necessitates jumping or being pushed off the family roundabout.

This is the story of a Northern middle-class family in the years before and after the First World War. Louisa Ashton is the matriarch of the family, with daughters Letty and Laura, sons Jim and Charles. Her children are now grown up and beginning to make their way in the world. War intervenes, and everything changes. We will follow the Ashton family closely with all its ups and downs as the pressures mount, and with them will come moments of sublime happiness, but also pain and tragedy, and many hard decisions to be made.

A book of special appeal to all women, this is set in the early years of the Second World War when domestic help was unavailable. Mrs Fairlaw, a cultured well-to-do woman in her fifties faces up to the problem of managing house and family on her own. She meets both trouble and tragedy with fortitude.

It was around 1926 that Marjorie ‘Malachi’ Whitaker wrote her first short story. Described as Bradford’s Chekhov, her stories are concerned with everyday life, are mostly set in Yorkshire and often concentrate on the gender dynamics between men and women.

This is the touching, humorous story of a young English girl's growth towards maturity in the 1930s. We see her at school and on holiday in Somerset, then witness her attempt at drama school, her year in Paris learning dressmaking and getting engaged to the wrong man. Finally, Mr Right turns up.

Eighty years ago, at the end of May 1921, Katherine Mansfield came to Switzerland, to live at the Chalet des Sapins in Montana (now Crans-Montana) in Switzerland. She was 32 and seriously ill with tuberculosis. The next few months were to be the most fruitful period of her life; she did not have much time left to her. The Montana Stories is a new edition compiled and edited by Persephone Books of everything Katherine Mansfield wrote between July 1921 and the end of January 1922 when she went to Paris for medical treatment. For completeness there are also the two stories and an unfinished fragment that she wrote after she left Montana and before her death in January 1923. She had of course written many short stories before, and had published two volumes of these, but as a collection The Montana Stories has a unique quality which inevitably owes something to her ill-health.

A varied collection of stories ranging in date from 1909 to 1986 including works by Katherine Mansfield, Irène Némirovsky, Mollie Panter-Downes, Elizabeth Berridge, Dorothy Whipple, Frances Towers, Margaret Bonham, Diana Gardner and Diana Athill.

These captivating and at times bizarre short stories were published posthumously in 1949. The stories deserve comparison to Katherine Mansfield and Rosamond Lehmann, and the central characters' cowed exteriors conceal poetic, romantic souls.