It's a building with well-trodden floorboards and a vaguely time-warped air on the outskirts of Bloomsbury. Persephone Books' current office and shop are one and the same. "I don't understand how they get away with it," she fumes. News that there's another version of Brideshead Revisited in production doesn't thrill Beauman either. Hence her bafflement at the BBC's recent production of Sense and Sensibility, which has, of course, been brought to the screen very successfully before. Beauman, now in her early 60s, is the proud republisher of 75 early to mid 20th-century books, most of them by female authors, and many of which are, in her eyes, prime candidates for adaptation ("except maybe the cookery books"). It's as if the film-makers think all the viewers can cope with is something they've already heard of before," says Nicola Beauman, founder of the printing house Persephone Books. 'All this emphasis on bonnets and re-doing of period dramas is demeaning and patronising.
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