[2] Beauman brought attention to middle-class women writers with her 1983 survey A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel, 1914–39.
[3] Her research showed how literary representations of female domesticity could challenge those social assumptions.
[7] According to The Guardian, Beauman founded Persephone Books to publish 'forgotten' novels by women, many of which she had written about in, A Very Great Profession: The Woman's Novel 1914-39, originally published by Virago in 1983 and reissued in 2008 by Persephone Books.
[6] In an interview with journalist Leonie Cooper, Beauman said that when she first started the press things were hard: "We had a lot of books piling up in the warehouse, but then we got a bestseller, which was phenomenally lucky.
"[10] That bestseller was Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson, which Persephone Books published in 2000 and which has been made into a film starring Frances McDormand.