Nicola Beauman
British publisher
Nicola Beauman (née Mann; born 20 June 1944) is a British biographer and journalist, and the founder of Persephone Books, an independent book publisher based in Bath, England.
Early life and education
She was born, as Nicola Mann, on 20 June 1944 into a Jewish family 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, 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.
Career
Beauman brought attention to middle-class women writers with her 1983 survey A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel, 1914–39. Her research showed how literary representations of female domesticity could challenge social assumptions. Much of Beauman's later writing has been literary biography. In 2022, Beauman was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Persephone Books
Beauman's Persephone Books is a publishing house that mainly publishes female authors. It was founded in 1998 as a mail-order publisher, and sales are mostly made online.
“Nicola Beauman” enters the record as british publisher. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Nicola, Beauman and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15836735. VIAF identifies the subject as 110117691. The Library of Congress control number is n86859619. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944, 1935, 2012 and 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nicola Beauman” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.