Saturday, March 16, 2013

Has Virago changed the publishing world's attitudes towards women?


It's 40 years since Virago Books was set up to celebrate the work of female writers. So how successful has it been in opening up the way for more women authors?

Virago women in 1988
The key team at Virago Books in 1988 (from left): Harriet Spicer, Ursula Owen, Lennie Goodings, Alexandra Pringle and Carmen Callil. Photograph: Susan Greenhill

In 1973, Carmen Callil started a publishing company with one key aim: to make women's writing central. Callil had grown up in Melbourne in Australia, then spent her 20s in London, part of a generation who felt the world was their oyster, she tells me, as we sit in her colourful living room, her border terrier snoring softly at our feet. She worked on the underground press, providing publicity for Ink magazine (company motto: "anything outrageous suitably publicised") and became friends with Marsha Rowe and Rosie Boycott, who started the feminist magazine Spare Rib in 1972. That title gave Callil the idea of doing the same thing for books. A new publishing company began at her kitchen table, and its name was coined, she says, when she and Boycott, "were sitting on the floor of my flat, going through a book of goddesses. Rosie came across Virago: 'a war-like woman', and I said: 'That's fine! I love it.'"

Ursula Owen and Harriet Spicer helped found the company, and it quickly became successful – in 1978, it launched the hugely influential Modern Classics series, with their distinctive green spines, celebrating and reviving the work of hundreds of female writers. It still thrives today, headed by Lennie Goodings, as an imprint of Little, Brown and last weekend celebrated the upcoming launch of Fifty Shades of Feminism, an anthology featuring essays from writers including Tahmima Anam, Xinran, Ahdaf Soueif and Bidisha.

Virago wasn't the only feminist publis.hing house to start in that era. It was part of a movement that began tentatively in the 1960s and burgeoned over the next two decades. Ambitions varied from publisher to publisher, but included a conviction that women's writing should be taken as seriously as men's, and, as a result, should have the same chance of remaining in print and becoming part of the canon. There was a strong interest in promoting the work of women who might otherwise be ignored; those marginalised by race, class, sexuality and disability, as well as sex. In the UK, Onlywomen Press specialised in lesbian writing, and Sheba showcased black, working-class and lesbian writers.

No comments: