Reading 20th-century women writers

'A large world, not a small canvas'

Hello and welcome to all my new subscribers, I’m so glad you’re here. Today’s piece is the story of how, back in the 1970s, the UK publisher Virago started re-issuing novels by international women authors from the 19th and 20th centuries. Today there are lots of publishing imprints (eg Daunt Books and Persephone in UK; McNally Editions in USA) as well as magazines and literary podcasts that focus on recovering ‘lost’ literature, including Backlisted, Neglected Books and (new to Substack) the excellent

Lost Ladies of Lit

with Amy Helmes and

Kimberley D Askew

. These have introduced a new generation of readers to some brilliant novels, but possibly it was Virago’s Modern Classics series that gave us the first bite of the apple. ‘I was living abroad when the list began,’ Hilary Mantel wrote. ‘When I came back briefly in the 1980s - not a published writer then - the green spines were everywhere. I remember thinking that the world had changed while my back was turned, and changed very much for the better.’