Pages: 473
Original date of publication: 1909-1986
My copy: 2012 (Persephone)
Why I decided to read:
How I acquired my copy: Persephone subscription, January
2013
The Persephone Book of Short Stories is a collection of thirty
short stories—some that have been previously published in other Persephone
books (crowd pleasers such as Minnie Panter-Downes’s “Good Evening, Mrs Craven”
and Irene Nemirovsky’s “Dimanche”)—some that have been published in the
Persephone Post, and others that appear here for the first time. The earliest
story in the collection, Susan Glaspell’s“A to Z,” was published in 1909 and
the last, Georgina Hammick’s “A Few Cases in the Day Case Unit,” in 1986.
My favorite story in the collection is the first: Susan
Glaspell’s “A to Z,’ in which a young college graduate gets a job as a
dictionary copyist at a publisher’s office. She strikes up a friendship with a
young man at the office; the irony of the story being that while these
characters’ bread and butter revolves around words, they cannot find words that
are adequate to describe their feelings for one another (personally, I could
also relate to the main character’s situation of having that feeling of jumping
off into the unknown after graduation, and of having a vaguely-defined dream to
work in publishing). Other Persephone authors that appear here include
Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Berridge, Dorothy Whipple, Frances Towers,
Margaret Bonham, Diana Gardner, Diana Athill, EM Delafield, Dorothy Canfield
Fisher, Norah Hoult, Betty Miller, and Penelope Mortimer. I was also pleased to
discover that stories by two more of my favorite authors, Edith Wharton and Dorothy
Parker, were included here.
The stories are arranged chronologically and their subjects
vary, but the theme is constant; the stories highlight the types of things that
women’s lives are focused on: relationships, family, jobs, etc. The collection
is therefore a pretty-well-rounded representation of the kind of fiction that
Persephone publishes. I only wish that the collection had included fewer
stories that had been previously published by Persephone, and more that were
new.
Comments