Nicola Beauman

Nicola Beauman (born Nicola Mann on June 20, 1944 in London ) is a British publisher and author .

Life

Nicola Mann's parents, Friedrich Alexander Mann and Eleonore Ehrlich (1907–1980), were lawyers of Jewish origin who had to emigrate from Germany in 1933 after the handover of power to the National Socialists. The couple had three children, Richard David (* 1935), Jessica (1937-2018) and Nicola.

Nicola Mann grew up in London. She studied English at Newnham College , Cambridge . Mann was initially married to the architect Nicholas Lacey, in 1983 she married the economist Christopher Beauman. She has five children born between 1968 and 1985, including Ned Beauman , born in 1985 , who published his first novel in 2010, and William Lacey, born in 1973, who was first conductor in Leipzig from 2010 to 2013 .

Her first book project, A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914-39 , was postponed during her childhood and was published by Virago in 1983 . Beauman wrote biographies about the English writers Cynthia Asquith and Elizabeth Taylor and the writer EM Forster . In 2003 she translated Anna Gmeyner's novel Manja from German into English under the pseudonym Kate Phillips .

Beauman founded Persephone Books in 1998 . The publishing house publishes neglected novels, diaries, volumes of poetry, biographies, cookbooks and non-fiction books , the common feature of which is that they all correspond to Nicola Beauman's taste and that they are all put in a gray book cover. The authors are predominantly female, and the books were first published in the first half of the twentieth century. The first book was William - An Englishman by Cicely Hamilton , but it turned out to be a flop on the book market. The publisher's 21st volume, Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day by Winifred Watson , was a bestseller and was therefore also filmed as Miss Pettigrew's big day . Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel The Making of a Marchioness was also made into a film for television in 2012 after the 1901 book was published by Persephone. By Dorothy Whipple eight volumes have been reprinted, the publisher has reprinted by 2014 more than one hundred books.

Fonts

• The other Elizabeth Taylor . London: Persephone Books, 2009
• Anna Gmeyner : Manja: a novel about five children . New translation into English by Kate Phillips. Preface by Eva Ibbotson . London: Persephone, 2003
• Morgan: a biography of EM Forster . London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993
• Cynthia Asquith . London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987
• A very great profession: the woman's novel 1914-39 . London: Virago, 1983

Web links

• Literature by and about Nicola Beauman in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Nicola Beauman , biographical information from Persephone

Individual evidence

1. ^ Leonie Cooper: Books lost and found , Feature, The Guardian , February 8, 2008
2. ^ William Lacey , website
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Rachel Cooke: One shade of gray: how Nicola Beauman made an unlikely success of Persephone Books , Interview The Guardian , November 25, 2012