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Nicola Beauman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nicola Beauman OBE (née Mann; born 20 June 1944[1]) is a British biographer and journalist, and the founder of Persephone Books, an independent book publisher based in Bath.

Early life and education

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She was born, as Nicola Mann, on 20 June 1944[1] into a Jewish family[2] and had two older siblings – Richard David Mann (1935–2012) and Jessica Mann (1937–2018). Her parents, both of whom left Nazi Germany in 1933 to come to Britain,[3][4] were Eleanore Ehrlich (1907–1980), a lawyer and judge, and her husband F A Mann (1907–1991), an international lawyer. She grew up in London and attended St Paul's Girls' School before studying English at Newnham College, Cambridge.[5]

Career

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Beauman brought attention to middle-class women writers with her 1983 survey A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel, 1914–39.[6] Her research showed how literary representations of female domesticity could challenge social assumptions.[7] Much of Beauman's later writing has been literary biography. In 2022, Beauman was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[8]

Persephone Books

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Main article: Persephone Books

Beauman's Persephone Books is a publishing house that mainly publishes female authors. It was founded in 1998[5] as a mail-order publisher,[9] and sales are mostly made online. In May 2021 the company's retail shop moved from Bloomsbury in London to Bath.[10]

According to The Guardian, Beauman founded Persephone Books to publish 'forgotten' novels by women, many of which she had written about in A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914–39, originally published by Virago in 1983 and reissued in 2008 by Persephone Books.[11] Most Persephone books come in a uniform grey cover, which Beauman sees as 'a guarantee of a good read',[12] and contain endpapers that use patterns or prints from the year in which the book was first published.[9]

In an interview with journalist Leonie Cooper, Beauman said that when she first started the press things were hard: "We had a lot of books piling up in the warehouse, but then we got a bestseller, which was phenomenally lucky."[13] That bestseller was Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson, which Persephone Books published in 2000 and which has been made into a film starring Frances McDormand.[4] Since then Persephone Books has continued to publish several books a year, and currently has 152 titles in print, including novels by Dorothy Whipple, Virginia Woolf, R. C. Sherriff, Katherine Mansfield, and E. M. Delafield.[14]

Publications

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Personal and family life

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She was married, first, to the architect Nicholas Lacey,[17] with whom she had three children: the children's author Josh Lacey, the events organiser Olivia Lacey[18] and the conductor William Lacey.[4]

In 1983, she married the economist Christopher Beauman (who was previously married to Sally Beauman, née Kinsey-Miles). She has two children with him: Francesca Beauman,[4] who is editorial director of Persephone Books,[19] and the novelist, journalist and screenwriter Ned Beauman.[20]

References

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  1. ^ a b "Contemporary Authors Online". Biography in Context. Gale. 2014. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
  2. ^ Lipman, Jennifer (18 April 2013). "Revealed: the UK's best young writers". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 18 April 2025.
  3. ^ Lewis, Geoffrey. "Mann, Frederick Alexander [Francis] (1907–1991)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/49887. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  4. ^ a b c d Tyrrel, Rebecca (19 May 2008). "'I am doing it for the books'". Financial Times. Retrieved 19 April 2025.
  5. ^ a b "People of Today". Biography in Context. Gale. 2011. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
  6. ^ Brown, Erica (July 2008). "Middlebrow". Working Papers on the Web. 11. Retrieved 27 April 2021.
  7. ^ "Nicola Beauman". Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors. Gale. 28 February 2014. Retrieved 27 April 2021.
  8. ^ "Nicola Beauman". Royal Society of Literature. Retrieved 9 May 2023.
  9. ^ a b Lyall, Sarah (15 April 2019). "Shelf Space for the Unsung Female Writer". The New York Times. Gale. Retrieved 27 April 2021.
  10. ^ "Our Shop". Persephone Books. Retrieved 9 May 2021.
  11. ^ Cooke, Rachel (24 November 2012). "One shade of grey: how Nicola Beauman made an unlikely success of Persephone Books". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
  12. ^ "About Us". www.persephonebooks.co.uk. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
  13. ^ Cooper, Leonie (8 February 2008). "Books lost and found". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
  14. ^ "Book List".
  15. ^ Lewis, Sophie (22 May 2009). "Review: A Very Great Profession". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 19 April 2025.
  16. ^ Cooke, Rachel (10 May 2009). "The original Elizabeth Taylor". The Observer. Retrieved 19 April 2025.
  17. ^ "Women's Word – why don't men read books by women?". University of Cambridge. 26 June 2011. Retrieved 20 April 2025.
  18. ^ Allen, Darina (2 April 2005). "Hot off the press". Irish Examiner. Retrieved 22 April 2025.
  19. ^ "About Fran". Francesca Beauman. Retrieved 19 April 2025.
  20. ^ Smith, Wendy. "Ned Beauman Heads to the Jungle". Publishers Weekly. Retrieved 26 May 2022.
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