The Ethics of Time Travel
Hattie Garlick on Persephone Books' literary resuscitations

After Persephone had swallowed pomegranate seeds from the underworld, she was compelled to travel back down every year to lodge amongst the dead. The journey was inescapable and cyclical, but the voices and the stories she encountered in the darkness must have changed each time. She must have learned an awful lot more than her girlfriends, flitting about on the world's surface. Today, each of her books performs the same shamanic transfiguration for anyone who happens to pass by her unassuming shop, tucked behind Russell Square on Lambs Conduit St. Open their dove-grey covers and you are sucked inside a time travel machine: submerged whole, always into the past but through myriad rooms, conversations, and world views.

Operating jointly from the confines of a small shop and the expanses of the internet, Persephone Books makes a business (or perhaps a crusade) of rescuing and re-printing neglected fiction and non-fiction, written largely by women in the inter-war period. The books are a motley crew but, says owner Nicola Beauman, a Persephone Book should leave you 'morally gutted... why are we not supposed to require stories anymore? ... Why must we all allow that The Waves is one of the best novels of modern times? É One of the most deep-rooted human interests is in drama. It goes back to the Stone Age, sitting around the fire and telling stories.'

The trouble is that the continuum has been ruptured. As pearls dull without human touch, stories either have their oxygen breathed into them as they are repeated aloud, or their heartbeat propelled by the rhythmic turning of their pages. How do you engender a conversation with the pages of a novel that has been abandoned over decades, their narratives and structures put to sleep across a period of social and literary change? "ResurrectionÉ" says Nicola, "That's why I do itÉ the unspoken dialogue I have with the women writers."

How to spark a dialogue with a dead writer? In fact, the practice itself of unearthing books buried by time revives the domestic wartime ethic, brought to life by many in the rich community of voices conversing across Persephone's shelves. Titles like Few Eggs, No Oranges, They Can't Ration These and How To Run your Home Without Help point to conditions that, when not the subject of the work, colour experience in many Persephone Books. Events often emerge fraught, electrified by the heightened sense of significance unique to wartime: a climate in which individual, domestic decisions are modeled by the stark lighting of life and death.

"Their social history is important to me" says Nicola, who spoke at the 'Conference on the Middlebrow' in Sheffield last June, on the benefits of rescuing 'middlebrow' literature for critical attention. It seems an appropriate battleground for Persephone's jumbled army of female writers, given Q.D Leavis' definition of the middlebrow as 'the unfortunate consequence of women forming the majority of library users'. Fifty years later, Bourdieu was to identify it simply as the taste of the middle class, bereft of any intrinsic qualities, inadvertently providing a glimmer of hope for the middlebrow, if consigned to the status of social-historical artifact. So are Persephone Books valuable solely as time-travel machines?

In the process of salvaging the books, Persephone reset most text (about 1/3rd are facsimiles, photographed from the original run). They correct typos, ("You'd be amazed by how many typos there are in the original Penguins"), and even re-arrange the odd awkward sentence. "Sometimes I do feel they would be quite pleased someone was taking so much time and care over the books", says Nicola. But the potentially limitless influence she wields over the texts indicates the danger every time-traveler dices with, entering into a game where power lies wholly in the hands of one player. In focusing on women and a particular period, doesn't she run the risk of tinting the subtleties of the texts with nostalgia, of colonizing the complex voices and histories encompassed by each?

"None of our books are nostalgia reads" Nicola asserts vehemently, and she's right. Persephone's first book, 'William an Englishman' reads like a manifesto against typecasts - a novel by a suffragette, about 'Englishness' and 'War', tearing painfully at the concepts of each and pinning heroism on the protagonist's ordinariness. As a rule, the rigorous interrogatory pulses sent out by the books' moral frameworks defy misty-eyed nostalgia.

What does interest Nicola, though, is the 'materiality' of her modern incarnations - whether a book's presentation changes the way you read it. Is the reading experience, or even the emotional response, different according to the book jacket, type etc that wraps up a narrative?

Persephone Books has artfully sidestepped these tangles. The book jackets are uniformly dove-grey, keeping a dignified silence that allows each book to speak for itself. The end papers are original prints, salvaged from sources as diverse as the Victoria and Albert Museum and old market dresses. They are re-produced without comment (though there are unspoken correspondences with the text; the red in the pattern for 'Someone at a Distance', for example, "I always think matches Louise's fingernails"). If you can't summon the magic to recast an 'unspoken dialogue' with the dead author into a modern-day design meeting, you can at least avoid shouting over their voice.

Perhaps this is why Nicola is so unwilling to define the blueprint for a Persephone Book, "In creating a list, an entity, you are giving those writers, who superficially have nothing in common, a dignity". Like the original design of Penguins, a pared-down aesthetic can be emblematic of a quiet understanding between author, publishing house, and reader. "We used to wait anxiously to see what would be in the new Penguin selection" says Nicola, "because we knew it meant quality". This quality defines itself in opposition to the corporate publishing houses that decide, in bulk, what we should read, and mould our tastes through gaudy book-jackets on displays in monster bookshops, ("I shudder walking past the windows of Waterstones", she says). By contrast Lettice Delmer - a novel in verse about an upper-class girl raped by her brother's fag - has sold only 800 copies, but still finds a place on Nicola's shelves. The lack of posthumous illustration gives Persephone books a dignity in the present: they are not represented but re-presented to the world, in the sense of presenting afresh. And this is a dignity rarely afforded even to the classics today.

Our prejudice against the past - at its simplest, most uninterrogated level - is a colonial one: it was subdued and surpassed by something more powerful, us. Where the colonial axis was psycho-geographical (stretching horizontally across an imagined world map, the subject diminishing in importance with every step away from Her Majesty's country), this one cuts vertically through time, the object increasingly dismissible according to its distance from us. Hence we look down on 'stories' with traditional narratives as something distasteful, something weak.

So in the case of Persephone Books, as with other 'post-colonial' texts, re-establishing a voice for the voiceless is only half the endeavor. The other is performing a disappearing act on the perceived gulf. "Take Dorothy Whipple" says Nicola. "her themes are essential today - men leaving their wives etc. - only the context is dated." To re-present a text then has a second important meaning: that of making present and pertinent once again. Do Persephone Books mean the same now as when they were first published? "I think they should" says Nicola, "but tangentially they take on new correspondences. We laugh now at 'How to Run Your Home', but my mother had a copy in her kitchen and took it perfectly seriously."

The trouble with time-travel is that the two time zones start to bleed into one other. Finish a Persephone Book, close up the time-machine, and you'll find your mind troubled for some time to come. And this is not least because of their moral framework. When these stories were first published the structure would have been taken for granted, near invisible. Now it strikes you forcibly and refreshingly - it is, in fact, almost avant-garde. Which goes to show that our perceived axis is not linear but spiraling at best, that traveling into the past can end up landing you in the futureÉ Or, in Nicola's more robust words, "You learn about life today through the past. In a way, things don't change."