Reading 20th-century women writers

'A large world, not a small canvas'

Today’s post 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.’

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Fifty years of Virago

The feminist publishing press Virago was born in 1973, the brainchild of Carmen Callil, an Australian who moved from Melbourne to London in the 1960s and found short-term jobs as a ‘publicity girl’ in the publishing industry, ‘then one of the few jobs available to women who did not want to be secretaries,’ she wrote.¹ In 1972 she was working for the new feminist magazine Spare Rib, whose founders Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe aimed to ‘put women's liberation on the news stands’. Callil decided that she wanted to do the same thing for book publishing in an industry that was still largely dominated by Oxbridge-educated men. ‘I started Virago to break a silence, to make women's voices heard, to tell women's stories, my story and theirs’.²

Originally called Spare Rib Books, Callil decided to rename it ‘Virago’ in 1973, to revive the word’s heroic original meaning of a strong, courageous female warrior, rather than its current sexist sense of a loud, overbearing woman. Virago became an independent publisher in 1976, and its logo, a bitten apple, symbolised both the sharing of knowledge and the ways in which the female sex has been demonised throughout history.  For fifty years, Virago books have reflected women’s march towards equality and ensured that women’s voices have been heard. Their success as a publisher is part of that story, reflected in the greater power of women in all fields of publishing today; that’s worth celebrating, even though there is certainly more to be done.

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Finding mainstream readers

The British Women's Liberation Movement was at its peak in the mid-1970s and many other feminist publishers besides Virago were springing up in the UK, including Sheba (publishing black, lesbian and working-class writers) and The Women's Press. Unlike other ‘alternative’ publishers and collectives, Callil had ambitions to reach a wide range of readers from the outset and to make Virago a profitable business. ‘There is a specialist publishing imprint for almost everything, except for 52% of the population - women’, its first catalogue boldly declared: ‘An exciting new imprint for both sexes in a changing world.’ 

In her memoir, former director Lennie Goodings describes how, after Virago launched its first ten books in 1975, a reporter asked if they were certain they would find enough to publish the following year. ‘As if’, Goodings notes laconically. However, as a publisher with only two employees (Callil and Harriet Spicer), limited distribution and no financial backing in its early years, Virago found it difficult to reach a mainstream readership. The first book it published was Mary Chamberlain’s Fenwomen: Portrait of Women in an English Village (1975), a respected work of history but far from a bestseller.

Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (Fontana paperback, 1979)

Brittain’s Testament of Youth

But within a few years Virago’s non-fiction list had its first notable success with Callil’s decision to republish Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth. This beautifully written memoir of the First World War and its aftermath - from the point of view of a young woman who worked as a Voluntary Detachment Nurse - was first published by left-leaning publisher Victor Gollancz in 1933 and had been out of print for decades until Virago reissued it in 1978.

The following year, Testament of Youth became an award-winning five-part BBC TV drama series starring Cheryl Campbell as Vera Brittain. Callil had approached the BBC herself with the idea in 1977, but it was not taken seriously until favourable reviews were published of the book in 1978. The TV serialisation led to a mass-market ‘tie-in’ paperback published by Fontana, a limited licence publishing deal that brought rich commercial rewards to Virago.

Testament of Youth remains in print as a Virago book today, its portrait of a politically-minded young woman with feminist, and later, pacifist politics still speaking to twenty-first-century readers and students around the world.³

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The fascinating Miss Pym

Virago Modern Classics

1978 also saw the launch of what is arguably Virago's greatest contribution to twentieth-century literature, Virago Modern Classics (VMC),  a series of classic novels in paperback (see my post about the Barbara Pym Virago series above.) As Margaret Drabble said, ‘it's not too much to claim that Virago Modern Classics changed the course of English literary history’, and the books made a huge impression on the lives of many thousands of readers. Explaining her approach to the series at the time, Callil said:

It was common to think of the literary tradition that runs from Jane Austen through Ivy Compton-Burnett to Barbara Pym as a clever and witty women’s view of a small domestic world. This was not a ghetto we accepted. The female tradition included writers of vast ambition and great achievement: mistresses of comedy, drama, storytelling, of the domestic world we knew and loved. I saw a large world, not a small canvas, with all of human life on display, a great library of women's fiction, marginalised, silenced, out of print and unavailable. Such writing has always been part of women's history.  

The first novel in the Virago Modern Classics series was Antonia White’s Frost in May (1978), a poignant story about a convent girl whose spirit the nuns try to break.

Originally published in 1933, it reminded Callil strongly of her own experiences at a similar school in Melbourne during the 1950s. All of the novels in the series were chosen for their intrinsic value as works of literature, and intended to challenge the literary canon established by F.R. Leavis, whose The Great Tradition (1948) only included two female novelists, Jane Austen and George Eliot. Elaine Showalter's influential A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, which Virago published in 1978, challenged such Leavisite assumptions about what constituted great literature (mostly by men) and set the stage for the explosive growth in feminist literary studies of the 1980s.

Antonia White, Frost in May (Virago, 1978)

Showalter’s book became ‘the unofficial sourcebook for Virago’s literary recovery work’ as the scholar D.M. Withers notes (2021, p. 9), and the Virago Modern Classics series introduced many overlooked nineteenth- and twentieth-century women authors to readers, including Willa Cather, Rosamond Lehmann, Elizabeth Taylor and Zora Neale Hurston.

The paperbacks’ distinctive green spines, imaginative paintings on the covers and new introductions made them appealing to both men and women across different generations.  

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Growing international success

Novels by Rosamond Lehmann and others are sometimes described as ‘lost’ because, although popular when first published, publishers had allowed them to go out of print, so they no longer appeared in bookshops and were not written about by literary critics. As well as putting such forgotten novels by women back into the male-dominated literary culture and making sure they were properly marketed in bookshops and reviewed widely in newspapers’ book pages and literary journals, republishing such books was a canny cost-effective option for Virago. They cost little to print and could be reissued more than once, according to the prevailing tastes of readers.

Though the company was still tiny, by the end of the 1970s Virago’s reputation was beginning to make it attractive to international writers, including the Canadian author

Margaret Atwood

, whose Surfacing and The Edible Woman were published as Virago Modern Classics in 1979. Atwood recalled the company’s first cramped office in a crumbling building in Soho, then a seedy part of London.

‘You walked up several flights of none-too-clean stairs to get to it, past an establishment which was - I think - a hairdresser's, but which sticks in my mind as a massage parlour’ (Margaret Atwood, 1993, p.6).

Virago published the original UK paperback editions of many of Atwood's novels, including The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Cat’s Eye (1988).

In 1984 Virago became the first UK publisher to publish Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Well known in America since its publication in 1969, her memoir had been turned down in the 1970s by other British publishers, who told Angelou that no one would be interested in the story of a black girl growing up in the segregated American South of the 1930s. Virago published all seven of Maya Angelou’s memoirs, essays, volumes of poetry and a cookbook, and today has sold over two million copies of her books, with a new edition of her works published in 2023.

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Angela Carter

From its beginnings, Virago’s list was varied and interesting, and they wanted to promote writers who could not be easily categorised, such as the iconoclastic English novelist, short story writer and essayist Angela Carter. Her lively journalism was collected in Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (1982) and her anthologies of stories for Virago included Wayward Girls and Wicked Women: An Anthology of Subversive Stories (1986), both of which are still in print today. Although her eighth novel Nights at the Circus (published by Chatto & Windus in 1984) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature that year, it was only after Angela Carter’s death in 1992 at the age of just 51 that the world caught up with what Virago had always recognised as her ‘outrageous, imaginative genius’ (Goodings, p. 167).

In the introduction to the Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales, published posthumously in 1993 (Carter had insisted on writing it even while seriously ill), Marina Warner described ‘her daring, vertiginous plots, her precise yet wild imagery, her gallery of wonderful bad-good girls, beasts, rogues, and other creatures’. Combined in one volume and renamed Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales (2005), it remains one of Virago’s bestsellers.

Angela Carter, Book of Fairy Tales (Virago, 2005)

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The future of feminist publishing

By the 1980s feminism had become a recognised movement in many countries, and in the UK the high-street bookseller WH Smith supported the first Feminist Book Week in 1984 with huge window displays. As an independent company Virago was facing financial challenges, however, and between 1982 and 1995 there were bitter disagreements about how best to continue to manage the business among its five directors, Carmen Callil, Ursula Owen, Harriet Spicer, Lennie Goodings and Alexandra Pringle. ‘The media love a so-called catfight,’ Goodings notes.

‘There are boardroom bust-ups all the time, but the demeaning coverage of women's disputes has an extra edge – an almost gleeful joy at what is portrayed as women failing’ (Goodings, pp. 124-5).

In 1995 Callil sold her shares in Virago, and the company was bought out by the American publisher Little, Brown (now part of Hachette UK).

Although there were triumphant press headlines such as ‘Virago has finally sold out on the feminist dream’, the move enabled the company to survive and to publish the paperback editions of Atwood’s Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin, as well as Maya Angelou's Letter To My Daughter (2010) and The Complete Poetry (2015).

Its readers stayed loyal, and with the increased financial security that came with belonging to a bigger company, Virago was also able to expand and attract new authors, including Sarah Waters, Marilynne Robinson and Shirley Hazzard.

But, inevitably, there were some losses. Virago’s new sales team decided that the elegant green spines of the Virago Modern Classics paperbacks were too old-fashioned for modern readers, and they disappeared from bookshops for twenty-two years.

Many faithful readers were thrilled when, as part of the VMC’s fortieth anniversary celebrations in 2018, the much-loved green spines of the 1970s were restored and this much-loved series now includes over 700 novels. January 2025 will see a new series, ‘Classics with bite’, with cover designs in different shades of green for different authors.

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Virago’s next steps

The publisher's aim, first articulated by Carmen Callil in 1973, was to place women’s writing in the mainstream and make their voices heard. But considerable as its achievements have been over the past fifty years, Virago has not changed everything. Publishing reflects gender expectations within the wider culture, and although women are now well represented on fiction prize shortlists, men still dominate the non-fiction bestseller charts. In the publishing industry, there has long been an awareness of a greater need for diversity, and much work still needs to be done in gender pay gap analysis and the predominantly white, middle-class staff of publishing houses.

Today, Virago is committed to making sure that a wider range of voices is heard through its books: ‘conversations around gender norms and definitions are being opened up even further, with transgender and non-binary experiences being explored and celebrated; the necessity of intersectionality is acknowledged’ Goodings writes (p.221). As world politics drift further to the right, the heroism involved in speaking out seems more important than ever. ‘Virago will always be her own woman; heroic, just like her name,’ Goodings, writes (p.261). Let’s hope so, for all of our sakes.

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This is a lightly edited version of an article first published as ‘Fifty Years of Virago’ in The English Review, April 2023. With thanks to Hodder Education and The English Review for permission to republish it. The weblink for the magazine is here: https://www.hoddereducation.com/english/english-review

First page of my article, ‘Fifty Years of Virago’ showing a still from the 2014 film Testament of Youth, starring Alicia Vikander.

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Sources

*A Virago Keepsake to Celebrate Twenty Years of Publishing with an introduction by Harriet Spicer (Virago Press, 1993)

Vera Brittain (2018) Testament of Youth with an introduction by Mark Bostridge (Virago Modern Classics)

Mary Chamberlain (1975) Fenwomen: Portrait of Women in an English village (Virago)

Carmen Callil (1998) ‘Women, publishing and power’ interview in Writing: a woman’s business edited by Judy Simons and Kate Fullbrook (Manchester UP)

– (2008) 'The Stories of our lives' The Guardian 26 April 2008

Lennie Goodings (2020) A Bite of the Apple: A Life with Books, Writers and Virago (OUP) (paperback in 2022)

Margaretta Jolly (2021) Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement 1968-Present (OUP)

Hilary Mantel’s words are quoted in Rachel Cooke. ‘Taking Women Off the Shelf’ The Guardian, 6 April 2008.

Antonia White (1978) Frost in May (Virago Modern Classics)

D.M. Withers Virago Reprints and Modern Classics: The Timely Business of Feminist Publishing (CUP, 2021) and “Green Spines, back story” , LSE blogpost, published 18 June 2021

1. Callil, 2008.

2. Callil, 2008

3. ‘Testament of Youth’ directed by James Kent, starring Alicia Vikander and Kit Harington, was released in 2014.