A Bite of the Apple Read online

  By the time I arrived at Virago it had published around thirty books, launched the Virago Modern Classics list, and was becoming a recognizable force.

  The girl who’d been a passionate reader, studied English literature and worked in a bookshop, had been raised, the oldest of five, by a bookish mother with feminist instincts and a liberal father, had landed where she felt she belonged. I’d left my country alone, to try my hand in Britain, and through a sort of blind instinctual feeling that it was right to pursue a job that felt like it might make a difference, had found it.

  Creating a list that has a political and philosophical mission gives a publishing house tremendous energy. Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, active from 1936 to 1948, is a significant example of a radical publishing house responding to a particular political time. The club’s aim was to ‘help in the struggle for World Peace and a better social and economic order and against Fascism’; its members were avid readers who were looking for a solution to the moral issues of the day and were provided with a monthly book club choice, a newsletter—even an annual rally. And its books wore a very distinctive livery of yellow and red.

  Virago’s list began with that same sense of purpose, urgency, and a deep awareness of its audience—and a view that there were many others out there who wanted to understand and be part of this world-changing ‘club’.

  Virago and the other feminist houses which preceded and soon followed in Britain and across the world published instinctively, knowing that there was a readership hungry for their books. Carmen Callil, Ursula Owen, and Harriet Spicer knew who they were publishing for; they shared their readers’ concerns, quests, and passions. Beginning on the crest of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Virago, unlike most publishing enterprises that work from nothing to build an audience, was almost immediately recognized as a living and breathing realization of many readers’ wants and desires. Women wanted a voice, women wanted to understand their history, women wanted to see themselves on the page, women wanted a champion, and women wanted their share.

  The feminist politics of the 1970s were complex and, like any social and political revolution, had many splinters. It also included those who didn’t want to speak out or get involved but who were deeply stirred and found themselves cheering silently from their own lives. The one thing all these groups had in common was a desire to be heard. The female voice had something to say. Women felt they had been left out, not asked and not represented, even in socialist politics—or perhaps especially in socialist politics. It was to this eager audience that Virago and the other feminist organizations of the time launched themselves.

  Carmen Callil said about Virago’s beginnings, ‘I was inspired by the explosive energy of the underground press . . . but frustrated by its lack of engagement with women’s ideas, their work, their opinions, their history.’

  ‘Their opinions’ sounds almost tame compared to the other noble pursuits—ideas, work, history—in her list, but it was key to the sense of the time. Women were just not listened to—particularly not in public debate and certainly not in the media, where if women voices were heard it was as adjuncts to men’s. It was not until 1975 that women were heard on the news regularly; before that, public-opinion surveys said women’s voices were not acceptable. The broadcaster Joan Bakewell remembers that ‘in the ’70s, I asked the head of BBC News, “Might a woman one day read the news?” and was told, “Absolutely not.”’ #MeToo and other feminist campaigns of many decades focus on the power of breaking the silence with the female voice: one that is even now still muted in some places, some industries, and some countries.

  But probably the most dramatic changes are the way women view themselves today compared to the 1970s, and the way that we, in the West, are seen and heard. In the introduction to I Call Myself a Feminist, which Virago published in 2015, the young women who edited the collection write, perhaps over-optimistically, but certainly reflecting their world: ‘It seems cool, vibrant, sexy to be feminist. We have access to ideas and resources and thoughts and articles that feminists in the seventies could only dream about . . . We have allies the world over and feminism is no longer seen as only a “women’s” issue’.

  Of course, we still have problems of male domination in all parts of life, but we cannot deny that the institutional changes—around taxes, banks, mortgages, marriage, divorce, domestic violence, childcare, work, MPs, civil partnerships—since then have been profound. And it’s thanks to women speaking out. Demanding that women be heard fuelled the feminist presses, newsletters, and magazines.

  When I ask Carmen to remember all these years later why she hired me, she says, ‘Well, I liked you. And you had opinions! I liked that.’

  Opinions. Part of the women’s movement was discovering that women even had opinions.

  Born out of this cacophony of voices, appealing to the various ways that feminism was being interpreted by the Women’s Liberation Movement, the late 70s and early 1980s in the UK saw the emergence of a staggering number of publications including: Shrew, Red Rag, The Feminist Review, Everywoman, Trouble & Strife, WIRES, Outwrite, Wasafiri, Revolutionary and Radical Feminist Newsletter, Cambridge Women’s Liberation Newsletter. America gave us many, among them Sinister Wisdom, Quest, and The Women’s Review of Books, which later became a British publication too; Canada introduced Amazones d’Hier, Lesbiennes d’Aujourd’hui, and Herizons.

  The most influential and wide-ranging feminist magazines were born in the same year: the American Ms.—founded by Gloria Steinem and Dorothy Pitman Hughes—and the British Spare Rib, founded by Marsha Rowe and Rosie Boycott, hit the streets in 1972; Ms. in January and Spare Rib in July. Crucially, what these two magazines wanted to do was to reach every woman and ‘to put women’s liberation on the news stands’. Ms. claimed to be the first mainstream publication of its kind to speak honestly and directly about real women’s issues. These magazines were not just reaching out to women who already identified as feminists: they were out to compete with the glossy women’s magazines. The Spare Rib founders believed: ‘There is the most urgent need for a magazine that will reach ALL women—that is, women who are frustrated by the limitations of existing magazines.’

  Virago began with the same mainstream mission. Carmen Callil Publicity Ltd (‘Anything outrageous suitably publicized’), set up in 1972 when Carmen was aged thirty-four, helped to launch Spare Rib and it gave Carmen the inspiration to turn to the industry she was most familiar with—she had worked at André Deutsch, Granada, and Quartet—to start a publishing house championing women’s writing. Carmen had been the publicist for Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch; she knew that books could be an agent of change.

  She remembers that ‘one day, when having a drink in a pub in Goodge Street, the idea for my publishing company came to me like the switching on of a light bulb’. That drink was with John Boothe, Joint Managing Director and Editorial Director of Quartet. Asked if he would support it, he immediately said yes.

  Initially she registered her idea as Spare Rib Books, to be published in association with Quartet. The name was changed to Virago in March 1973, just before the first official board meeting on 21 June with Marsha Rowe and Rosie Boycott of the recently formed Spare Rib.

  Carmen remembers: ‘Rosie and I sat on the floor of my flat and went through books on ancient gods etc and Rosie found the name.’ Virago: provocative, a heroic war-like female, and ‘a strong, courageous, outspoken woman, a battler. Irreverence and heroism, that’s what we wanted.’

  Virago wanted to address all women and all of women’s experiences. It challenged the idea of niche publishing from the start: ‘There is a specialist publishing imprint for almost everything, except for 52% of the population—women. An exciting new imprint for both sexes in a changing world,’ announced Virago’s first catalogue. The refusal to be seen as marginal; the desire to inspire and educate and entertain all women, and men too; to bring women’s issues and stories into the mainstream; to demonstrate a fema
le literary tradition: these passions and beliefs were the bedrock of Virago. ‘It was not enough to publish for ourselves,’ said Carmen.

  That attitude remains ours today.

  Not all of the feminist houses gave themselves this mission, this reach, these intentions.

  Women’s words were beginning to rock the status quo. Books reporting from the front line of womanhood were published by some of the male hierarchical establishments that these books criticized. Important and life-changing memoirs and polemics firing up the Women’s Liberation Movement from academics, journalists, poets, and novelists could not be kept down.

  The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963) and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970) took on the patriarchy; Against our Will by Susan Brownmiller (1975) took on rape culture; Hidden from History by Sheila Rowbotham (1973) told us why our stories had not been told; Angela Davis’s If They Come in the Morning (1971) brought news of the Civil Rights Movement; and Fat is a Feminist Issue by Susie Orbach (1978) heralded the conversations around the female body. Then there were books that would later become Viragos: Sexual Politics by Kate Millett (1970) on literature; Patriarchal Attitudes by Eva Figes (1970) on history (with the strapline ‘My Case for Women to Revolt’); Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich (1976) on motherhood; and the memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969).

  Arguably the mother of all of this generation of feminist books, which proclaimed that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes a woman’, was The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, published in 1949 and translated into English in 1953.

  Novels too were picking up on the restless mood of the times: Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman; Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone; The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing; The Women’s Room by Marilyn French; The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison; and, a few years later, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple were among the many.

  This rewriting, new telling, and, crucially, these new perspectives were for many, to use a phrase of the time, mind-blowing. The crime writer Val McDermid remembers reading Kate Millett’s book: ‘It was as if an explosion had gone off in my head. My politics had always been of the left, but I’d never really encountered a feminist perspective before. Sexual Politics allowed me—it forced me—to look at the world in a different way. I was on fire with what I had read.’

  Rosie Boycott remembers The Female Eunuch with similar amazement: ‘She bowled me over. I was stunned by her extraordinary beauty and her daring, her openness about sex, her obvious pleasure in taking on men, her extreme cleverness which combined with her wicked sense of humour . . . I remember her writing that women should “consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood”, something I doubt too many actually did, but ideas like this pushed back the boundaries of being female, making our claustrophobic female world suddenly much, much bigger . . . for me, her vibrancy and sheer zest for life played a key part in changing mine.’

  The ideas grew, handed woman to woman. The Women’s Room, remembered the writer Nuala O’Faolain, was ‘slipped to me like Samizdat to pass on as quickly as possible’.

  The books, bought in shops, borrowed from libraries, shared urgently among friends, taken home to read in bed, stuffed in bags to read on buses, in backpacks to read on trips—these words of women—were privately and eagerly consumed.

  There were marches and conferences, and the beginning of consciousness-raising groups, but nothing compares to the intimacy of reading; the private seduction of being alone with words that are speaking just to you, the reader, cannot be over-estimated. The writer A. L. Kennedy understands: she says that when you read, you hear the words ‘in your most intimate organ—the brain’.

  In the year before I came to London, while living in a bedsit in Victoria, at the southern tip of Vancouver Island, I read a novel that transformed the way I thought about myself. Aged twenty-three, I had moved nearly 3,000 miles from my friends, family, and boyfriends at home in Ontario to the west coast of Canada to try my luck at making my own way. I worked in a spaghetti restaurant at night and Borogrove Bookshop (a name inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky) in Centennial Square by day, and though I did make some friends I was lonely and turned often to books. The Diviners by the Scots-Canadian writer Margaret Laurence told the story of Morag Gunn. Morag had a great appetite for life, for ideas, for sex (memorably, on the kitchen floor) and was torn between two men: one an appealing intellectual, the other an earthy man of few words with strong feelings—which, as it happened, somewhat reflected my life at the time. Morag thought that whichever one she went with would define who she would become, and though I had already forged my own adventure and proved I could make a living and live alone, I too had the sense of myself as waiting to be defined by a man. I thought my life would be a reflection of whoever my husband might be. In a sudden epiphany, Morag saw there was another answer: she dropped them both and took herself off to London to live her own life. And, reader, so did I.

  ‘Reading is a way of becoming the person you are interested in being,’ says A. L. Kennedy. These words, these ‘womenwords’ that we were reading, were whispering recognition, revolution, and insurrection. It’s no wonder to me that women wanted more. Women wanted their own magazines, their own papers, and their own publishing houses.

  It’s hard today to capture that feeling of optimism, the sense of possibility fearlessly pitched against entrenched patriarchy—all with the profound belief that we would win the battle, that we would change the world. Did we think it was going to be that simple? Possibly we did.

  What I have come to see is that out of this sort of popular force, this massive wave of demand for change, singular characters will emerge. They are those who only see the goal, who are aware of the hurdles but believe they are right and invincible in their pursuit. Often these people have only a little experience of what they are about to throw themselves into, but by sheer belief in themselves and their mission they win through.

  Carmen was such a person. Of course she could not have built Virago alone. First she had Marsha and Rosie with whom to dream and scheme, before they left to focus on Spare Rib and then resigned from the Virago Board in 1974 and 1975 respectively.

  Then Ursula, beginning in 1973, becoming Editorial Director in 1974, was absolutely crucial and a brilliant, fiery complement to her. Carmen couldn’t have done it without Harriet Spicer’s vital, intelligent, steadying help right from the beginning of Carmen Callil Publicity Ltd. Alexandra Pringle and I, joining part time in 1978, and then the others including Kate Griffin (1979), Lynn Knight (1980), Ruthie Petrie (1982) of those early days, were also important, but Carmen, seizing the moment, seeing the possibility—she was the ignition.

  It was rage against injustice that fuelled Carmen, made her blind to some of the obstacles, and gave her the courage and almost monomaniacal chutzpah to overcome them. In her case, the power of an absolute sense of being right was combined with a deep knowledge and love of literature, and the skill of obsessive, meticulous planning. It was a dynamite combination. I choose the word dynamite because that sort of raging passion and disregard is often combustible and can leave a burned path in its wake. Over the years, though many were cherished and inspired, many too got scorched. I think of the number of people I used to meet who would complain, ‘Carmen isn’t speaking to me.’ I sit now in an open-plan office and think back to Carmen’s style of management . . . It wouldn’t wash now. (Though however one handles it, power brings complications; once I became Publisher I too found I have a few people who won’t speak to me.) But it was her intense drive which inspired the rest of us and kept it going. Said Carmen, ‘We must survive. It is our duty not to go bust. Virago must be here for future generations, ensuring that women writers are not forgotten again.’

  I have known Carmen now for decades, and I know from what she has said that her sense of injustice started in part with the Catholic Church. It has always been a source of great pleasure to know that Carmen and Germaine Greer wer
e educated at the same convent school, remembered by Carmen as ‘rules, censorship and silence, and above all a sense of disapproval waiting to pounce on those rare times when you felt most entirely yourself. And an obsession with sin.’

  Carmen came to London in 1960 and fell in with the Australians of the underground press at Ink newspaper, then worked in publishing before founding her own publicity company. But even though the times were liberal and changing, the patronizing attitudes of men, both those on the left and the old-fashioned ones (‘beige men’, Carmen used to call them) of the British publishing world, stoked the old feelings of injustice. Being unfairly treated, feeling powerless against a larger structure—first Catholicism, then patriarchy and the British establishment—made Carmen frustrated, and determined to take control and have her own power.

  Every woman who becomes a feminist has woken up to an understanding of injustice, to the corroding effect of patriarchy. I grew up with petty and belittling remarks and expectations; I witnessed and was angered by unfairness for girls and women; and when I was at university I began to understand how we women have learned to be our own censors, voyeurs of ourselves, checking and modifying ourselves for correct looks, behaviour, and even dreams and ambitions. I believe the world is still far from equal but I wouldn’t say I have that constant, burning howl of rage against injustice that seems to inhabit Carmen. (Even now she refers to herself as a ‘seething pot’.) But it’s a hot flame I was very drawn to. Drawn to that and the idea that books, particularly when collected under the Virago umbrella, could make a difference.

  Carmen was famously outstanding at publicity and much of the Virago look and style and indeed ‘branding’ was down to her. Her intelligent and encouraging editorial skills became evident as Virago progressed.