My first Persephone

In anticipation of Persephone Reading Weekend, coming up soon, and in ongoing envy of all the Persephone reading going on around me, and because I enjoy food writing, I ordered Agnes Jekyll's Kitchen Essays.  I noticed the lovely smooth paper and a hint of gray around the edges (like my hair, all too often), but where was the distinctive and elegant gray cover? Where were the beautiful endpapers, waiting to be revealed? Where was the bookmark? I was a little disappointed.

But I've now realized that what I bought was a Persephone Classic, a little bit of a Persephone Lite, looks-wise. But that's okay, because I'm smitten with the few bits I've read at random, and reading about it on the Persephone website {where I went to investigate} makes it even more enticing:

The author of Kitchen Essays (1922) was sister-in-law to the great Gertrude Jekyll, whose biographer wrote that if she 'was an artist-gardener, then Agnes was an artist-housekeeper.' Agnes was a famous hostess (the guests at her first dinner party included Browning, Ruskin and Burne-Jones) and her home, Munstead House, 'was the apogee of opulent comfort and order without grandeur, smelling of pot-pourri, furniture polish and wood smoke'...

During 1921-2 (the now) Lady Jekyll wrote unsigned essays for The Times with titles such as 'Tray Food' and 'Sunday Supper'. The Observer Food Magazine commended 'lovely Persephone Books' for reprinting Kitchen Essays, India Knight in The Shops called it 'beautifully written, sparkling, witty and knowing, an absolute delight to read', while the BBC Food Magazine praised 'this exquisitely reprinted period piece'. To listen to some extracts from Kitchen Essays, read by Helen Garlick for the website Talking of Food, please click here. {And so I did.}

And all this means is that my first gray-covered, gray-spined, bookmark-included Persephone is a pleasure still waiting to happen. Is it wrong to pick Persephones based on which endpapers you like best? If it isn't, I'll be reading one of these...

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