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?
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.
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