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Out of the Window by Madeline Linford has been reissued by the independent press Persephone Books. To celebrate this relaunch and Manchester writer, Linford was also the first Women’s Page editor of the Guardian, Michael Herbert discusses the importance of this book and Linford’s work with Nicola Beauman, founder of Persephone Books.

Michael Herbert is an historian, specialising in women's history, who has been working on an anthology of Madeline Linford's journalism. His publications include Up Then Brave Women : Manchester’s Radical Women 1819-1918; For the sake of the women who are to come after: Manchester’s Radical Women 1914 to 1945; and an article about Sarah Parker Remond in ”We are No Dirty Shirkers” : Women Unionising, Marching, Protesting… and Singing, published by the Mary Quaile Club.

Nicola Beauman née Mann was born in 1944 and brought up in London. After reading English at Cambridge she married Nicholas Lacey, the architect, worked in New York as a journalist and in an art gallery, and in London in publishing and as a fiction reviewer; her five children were born between 1968 and 1985. In 1976 she married the economist Christopher Beauman. A Very Great Profession: The Woman’s Novel 1914-39, her first book, was published by Virago in 1983 (reprinted 1989 and 1995); it was reissued in 2008, twenty-five years after first publication, as a Persephone book. Cynthia Asquith appeared in 1987, Morgan: a biography of EM Forster in 1993, and The Other Elizabeth Taylor was published in April 2009 as A Persephone Life. Nicola Beauman founded Persephone Books in 1999.

Two of Linford’s books in the collection of the Portico will be on display and copies of the relaunched novel will be on sale.