The publishing house Persephone Books is a labour of love for its founder Nicola Beauman. As the company opens a second bookstore, she tells Rebecca Tyrrel about her passion for rediscovering neglected 20thcentury classics

I discovered Nicola Beauman when I read Morgan, her 1993 biography of EM Forster. It was a book that inspired me not just to re-read great swathes of Forster and enjoy them much more, but perhaps to one day have a go at literary biography myself. A decade or so of procrastination later and for the purposes of re-motivation I read Morgan for a second time and decided that if there was a blueprint for the genre then Beauman's was it.