Persephone
Published on 26. June 1986
Book
Hardback
304 pages
978-0-906427-77-4 (ISBN)
Description
Persephone loses her innocence in the Underworld, but finds herself. She is Everywoman coming through darkness, betrayal and disillusion to discover a new life, a new sense of herself. And she is many women in Jenny Joseph's extraordinary novel, which retells the Greek myth of spring and winter, of good and evil.
Demeter the earth goddess is every worried mother struggling to understand her daughter. Hades is the reckless man, brutal, possessive, but mellowed by the girl he takes for himself, the woman who goes back to him.
In Persephone, Jenny Joseph has created a new kind of novel, a story made up of many stories, our stories, using poetry, narrative, parody and many other kinds of writing. Like the myth itself, Persephone is unforgettable. The book won her the 1986 James Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.
Demeter the earth goddess is every worried mother struggling to understand her daughter. Hades is the reckless man, brutal, possessive, but mellowed by the girl he takes for himself, the woman who goes back to him.
In Persephone, Jenny Joseph has created a new kind of novel, a story made up of many stories, our stories, using poetry, narrative, parody and many other kinds of writing. Like the myth itself, Persephone is unforgettable. The book won her the 1986 James Black Memorial Prize for Fiction.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Illustrations
24 Halftones, black and white
Dimensions
Height: 200 mm
Width: 132 mm
Weight
573 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-906427-77-4 (9780906427774)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Jenny Joseph (1932-2018) was born in Birmingham, and grew up in Buckinghamshire and later in Devon where she was evacuated during the war. She was first published by John Lehmann in the 1950s. She lived in London for many years and then for much of her life in Gloucestershire before moving to Swansea. Her first book of poems, The Unlooked-for Season (1960), won her an Eric Gregory Award, and she won a Cholmondeley Award for her second collection, Rose in the Afternoon (1974). Two further collections followed from Secker & Warburg, The Thinking Heart (1978) and Beyond Descartes (1983). Her Selected Poems was published by Bloodaxe Books in 1992, drawing on these four books. She is best-known for her poem 'Warning', a dramatic monologue in which a young woman talks of her fantasies of old age, voted Britain's favourite modern poem in a BBC poll in 2006. First published in Rose in the Afternoon, 'Warning' is included in her Bloodaxe Selected Poems. Her other books included: Persephone (Bloodaxe Books, 1986), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Beached Boats (Enitharmon Press, 1991), a collaboration with photographer Robert Mitchell; Ghosts and other company (Bloodaxe Books, 1995); a book of prose, Extended Similes (Bloodaxe Books, 1997), All the Things I See (Macmillan Children's Books, 2000); a gardening memoir, Led by the Nose: A Garden of Smells (Souvenir Press, 2002); a collection of new and later selected poems, Extreme of things (Bloodaxe Books, 2006); and Nothing Like Love (Enitharmon Press, 2010), a selection of her love poems.