A Bite of the Apple Read online

  Ursula was the Editorial Director and I warm to this description of her from a Guardian profile in July 2001: ‘The editor and publisher Ursula Owen has always considered herself an outsider. A very English German, a very Jewish Christian, a radical in a conservative world, a conservative in a radical world. Owen has often wanted to belong, to be quietly accepted. At the same time, part of her has always laughed, or scowled, in the face of convention.’

  Ursula had come from a career in editorial—from Frank Cass publishers—and was highly experienced in commissioning and editing. Born in England to German-Jewish parents, she was an intriguing mix of an impassioned, rather explosive temperament combined with an English bluestocking education; her background and education gave her Oxbridge confidence and connections. She was part of one of the most famous women’s groups, the Arsenal Women’s Group (Arsenal due to location, not the football team) and so combined grass roots feminism with the analysis that was emerging from feminist academics. Articulate and clever, she had a nose for good books and was a very intuitive editor. Divorced, she had a child, Kate, who we all came to know and like very much.

  Harriet, who has a sense of fairness through to her core, was Carmen’s right-hand woman. Blessed with a literary and artistic eye, no doubt influenced by her mother’s bohemian life (she moved in circles that included the sculptor Elisabeth Frink and the painter Duncan Grant) Harriet also cites her mother, a spirited woman who made her own way post-divorce in the 1950s, as inspiration for independent thinking.

  Harriet, also Oxford educated and well read, is younger than both Ursula and Carmen by ten to twelve years and so was more attuned to Alexandra and me, who are three years younger again. She was well attuned to Carmen’s ways. She is also a beacon of justice and was not against making her views known when she felt things were not right.

  The Virago author Sarah Waters, looking back at the mid to late 1980s, observes that it was an extraordinary, exhilarating time, one of ‘dismantling the grand narratives’. And that is right; there were fierce arguments and differences among feminists about how we should change the world and what it should be changed to, but what is unarguably true is that stories, histories, memoirs, rants, poems, articles, essays, explorations were like fireworks, rockets lighting up possibilities, blowing up old, entrenched ideas; words were going to tear down and rebuild the world. Words were incendiary and liberating. Words were heralding a new dawn.

  Angela Carter wrote, ‘The sense of limitless freedom that I, as a woman, sometimes feel is that of a new kind of being. Because I simply could not have existed, as I am, in any other preceding time or place.’

  A new kind of being . . . Sitting in a tiny kitchen at the top of a collective house in Tufnell Park in north London, I turned the pages of my first Spare Rib magazine—shocked by the honesty of some of the articles, amused and gladdened by others—and felt the thrill of possibility.

  Chapter Two

  Setting the World on Fire

  ‘The one thing that’s really memorable about those early days at Virago is the pace at which you worked . . .’ Harriet remembers, and that ‘it was all learning and doing things for the first time and thinking yippee!’ Carmen concurs, ‘Harriet was always very elegant. She . . . kept her cool and did her work . . . I just left things (re the publicity company) in her hands.’

  Virago’s first books, in association with Quartet, were published from Carmen’s flat in Cheyne Place in Chelsea and were partially financed by Carmen Callil Publicity Ltd. An arrangement was made with Quartet: they would finance, produce, distribute, and own the books which Virago commissioned for them for a fee of £75 for each title and a royalty of 2.5 per cent on all sales.

  The character and tone of the press was almost immediately established: Fenwomen by Mary Chamberlain was Virago’s launch title in September 1975. A vivid social and oral history of an isolated village in the Cambridgeshire Fens, it provided a portrait spanning 100 years through the voices of the women who lived there. It signalled a crucial aim of Virago: to publish the stories of women’s everyday lives, stories previously not thought worth telling and recording. Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden: Women’s Sexual Fantasies followed in October and it was—and is—an eye-opening book that showed Virago was not afraid to publish provocatively.

  In December 1976, having published ten books from Carmen’s flat, where in a nod to the three cats who also lived there the address for cables and telegrams was caterwaul, Carmen, Ursula, and Harriet decided to leave the support of Quartet and go out on their own.

  Sonny Mehta, then publisher at Pan, where he started the Picador imprint, and now Editor-in-Chief at Knopf in America, gave Carmen an article from the American Publishers Weekly—‘Mr Hopeful Starts a Publishing Company’—and taught her about profit and loss. Says Ursula, ‘In our year with Quartet we had learned two things: how vital it is to have total financial control . . . and how any requirement to refer to others on editorial decisions . . . is a constraint . . . Armed with a cash flow sheet and a publishing proposal for the first three years, we set off.’

  With a loan of £10,000 from the Rowntree Trust, money from Ursula’s uncle Ernst Grunfeld, a good bit of Carmen’s money, and £1,500 capital, Virago was relaunched as a fully independent company.

  In the 2017 television documentary about Virago, Changing the World One Page at a Time, made by Claire Walley, Carmen remembers their small bank overdraft ‘needed to be guaranteed by two men’ and, laughingly savouring the irony, says she should have said, ‘Would you mind guaranteeing my overdraft so that I can bring down the world?’

  The two men loyal to Carmen were Bob Gavron of St Ives printers and the publisher Paul Hamlyn. So many men and women have helped Virago along the way and this period was no exception.

  In July 1977 they moved to the fourth floor of 5 Wardour Street in Soho, which is where I found them a year later, and by then they had raised another £25,000 by selling some of the shares, with the majority held by the three women, which now included Harriet.

  Having not really experienced mainstream publishing, I was under the impression that Virago was exactly what all publishers were like: a vigorous, driven, idealistic bunch of people. It accorded with the little I knew of Canadian publishing, where the small presses of 1960s Toronto—Anansi, Coach House—had the same sort of missionary zeal; in their case to publish, invent even, the dawning of what was called CanLit, or in the case of Canada’s Women Press, feminist publishing. It didn’t seem odd to me that one would throw one’s entire life and spirit into the enterprise. Of course you did. But as I got further into publishing, I began to realize that no, this little enterprise was quite unlike the monoliths of British publishing and these passionate women were not at all the standard women in publishing, who at the time were clever types who mainly worked for the powerful men who defined the houses and took the publishing decisions. The Virago women were also clever but they took the decisions; they were the powerful ones. That delight in power and that passion for the project all contained in one small room was exhilarating but, to be frank, also often fraught and sometimes scary. It took me a few adrenalin-pumping years to find out it was not your average British publishing house.

  The ‘new kind of being’ that Angela Carter identified was women hungry for their history. Thanks to Ursula’s knowledge of the History Workshop Journal people, feminist academics, and socialist feminist groups, and inspired by Sheila Rowbotham’s revolutionary Hidden from History (1973), Virago knew that there was so much women’s history to be discovered.

  One of the early initiatives was the Virago Reprint Library. Remembers Ursula, ‘We were determined to reclaim a history, a feminism and a literature which had been lost or neglected. In this we were not only in tune with feminist historians . . . but were influenced by new writing in social and cultural history which was among the most important work being done in the 1960s and 1970s, most significantly E. P. Thompson�
�s The Making of the English Working Class and Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society.’

  The first book of the newly independent Virago was Life as We Have Known It, edited by Margaret Llewelyn Davies, a collection of writings by working-class women first published in association with the Co-operative Women’s Guild in 1931. It was reprinted with a new introduction alongside the original one by Virginia Woolf: ‘These voices are beginning only now to emerge from silence . . . These lives are still half hidden in profound obscurity.’ The history of women repeats itself and Virago was determined to get these histories in print and to keep them in print too—the commitment to backlist publishing was there from the start to avoid later generations, as Carmen said, ‘searching through libraries and coming, with astonishment, upon the accounts of women who had the same hopes, problems and experiences’.

  There followed, among others, Maternity: Letters from Working-Class Women edited by Margaret Llewelyn Davies; Working-Class Wives by Margery Spring Rice; the astonishing Round About a Pound a Week by Maud Pember Reeves; Florence Bell’s At the Works; Women and Trade Unions by Barbara Drake; the famous Women and Labour by the great South African writer Olive Schreiner; and the suffragist and suffragette histories The Cause by Ray Strachey and My Own Story by Emmeline Pankhurst.

  Some of these books had originally been published by the Co-operative Women’s Guild or the Fabian Women’s Group, whose first aim was ‘to study the economic position of women and press their claim to equality with men . . . to be secured by socialism’—and had long been out of print. Some were reissued with new introductions by feminist historians such as Sally Alexander and Anna Davin, and some with their original introductions.

  This was an extraordinary period of study for women—both in and out of the universities and further education colleges.

  The most successful of the early Virago non-fiction reprints was Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain, first published in 1933 and out of print for decades. It was given to Carmen by the academic Rosalind Delmar; Carmen read it through tears on a beach in Australia and returned to the office determined to put it back in print. And not only in print: she sent a copy to BBC TV and suggested they make a television series, which they did in 1979, with a marvellous series starring Cheryl Campbell. Virago was small at the time, with limited distribution, and wouldn’t be able to enjoy the sales that would result from the programme, so a limited-licence paperback sale was made to Fontana, who produced a mass-market film tie-in paperback edition, to be sold alongside the Virago edition. When their licence elapsed, the Virago edition was once again the only one in the market. Testament of Youth remains in print today, a stalwart of the Virago backlist, still speaking to generations of readers and students, and most interestingly, as Brittain’s biographer Mark Bostridge says in his introduction to the Virago centenary edition, from obscurity it has become a lasting testimony, ‘more famous than the books by men that inspired it’.

  The format known as trade paperback—originated first by Sonny Mehta at Paladin and Picador—was Virago’s size of choice. It could take a slightly higher paperback price—£1.99—and its larger size allowed for an elegant cover. Because it was essential to have Virago books reviewed and there was then (and still is now) an old-fashioned idea that books were not worthy of attention unless they were in hardback, Virago also frequently published simultaneously a small hardback print run of around 500 copies, for the reviewers and the libraries. Carmen, queen of publicity, has said: ‘Virago was founded with two main aims. One was ideological, the other a marketing belief . . . to get every inch of publicity we could for each book we published.’ And we did.

  Harriet turned eagerly to learning production: ‘It was in my blood and I loved the tangible object.’ Her father was a paper-maker, running Spicers Paper, and she embraced working with printers, typesetters, and indeed paper merchants. It was thrilling to learn.

  Carmen also claims merchant blood in her veins. She recalls with huge fondness her Lebanese uncle’s factory in Australia, which she often visited as a young girl. ‘I loved the atmosphere . . . I wasn’t afraid of business, of the making of things. I absolutely knew that my business was possible.’

  While in general feminists agreed with Simone de Beauvoir that women want to ‘dethrone the myth of [inherent] femininity’, feminism also raised the question: what is femaleness? What is the essential nature of women? And is our difference from men irrelevant to our equality with men? Are we different but equal? And do we want to be equal to men anyway? Why are men the standard?

  (I still love the jokey slogan of that time, interestingly coined by a man, Timothy Leary: ‘Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.’)

  Or, as Carmen said, ‘There are the people who think women should become like men, but there are quite enough men around. We had something better in mind!’

  Virago was often pressed to define feminism and that definition was something Virago has always refused to be hard-line about. The same is true today. Our books look at the world through women’s eyes but we’ve never taken a stand on what is the ‘right’ kind of feminism. We have always thought that people should be their own judge of that. What we wanted to do was put women centre stage and highlight women’s achievements and history.

  Transgender rights and identity conversations have re-awoken those early discussions around what is woman. There is no doubt that women are still discriminated against but I think there is, at last, a general agreement that society should be trying to ensure that women, and now transgender and non-binary people, have the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities as men. But that was far from true back then, and the laws safeguarding equality were very new. Only a few years had passed since the Sex Discrimination Act had become UK law in 1975. In Canada the 1977 Human Rights Act was put in place around the time of the Equal Rights Amendment in the USA. Feminists were constantly put in a position of explaining, defending, and arguing their case.

  As well as applying to Virago, I had sent my CV to another radical publishing house, Writers and Readers Publishing Co-operative. Virago’s offer of one day a week coincided with them offering me a job too. We agreed that I would work for them four days a week; I handed in my notice at the publicity company and embarked on a year of contrasts.

  Writers and Readers was a free-wheeling, high-minded co-operative ‘run’ by two married couples: Glenn Thompson (who had founded Centerprise Bookshop in Hackney, London) and Sian Williams, who handled the finance and sales, alongside the editors who were the then married couple Lisa and Richard Appignanesi (fellow Canadians, I discovered to my pleasure). To say they were idealistic publishers was an understatement: it was a company that seemed to be entirely fuelled by passion, ideas, and international feminist and socialist politics. The leaflet they gave me entitled ‘A British Publishing Co-operative: Who We Are and What We Do’ states they were formed in the autumn of 1974, ‘with a minimum of theory, high hopes and no capital’. But this was prefaced by ‘What theory do we espouse? Latter-day Phalansterian; Owenite socialism; Proudhonian mutalism?’ And they were members of the Industrial Common Ownership Movement.

  I was out of my depth in terms of their theory but I knew they published some outstanding, important titles and I liked their policy of encouraging writers to assume greater control over the production of their own books. Notable were the Beginners’ Guides, one of the original, influential graphic series. This list of deeply intelligent and accessible books on political and cultural theory with texts written by experts and illustrated by impressive cartoonists was launched with Marx for Beginners. They went on to publish Trotsky, Mao, Freud, Einstein, and Feminism for Beginners, among many others. Writers and Readers also published the left-wing playwright Arnold Wesker and the great novelist and cultural commentator John Berger, author of the ground-breaking Ways of Seeing. These authors were part of the co-operative; I have a treasured copy of John Berger’s novel Pig Earth, which he has signed ‘Thanks f
or keeping the faith’. In so many ways Writers and Readers were ahead of their time: publishing non-sexist children’s books, novels in translation, books about education and literacy: writers including Paulo Freire, Frantz Fanon, Alejo Carpentier, Victor Serge. The emphatic aim was also to be international. One of their first titles was Little Girls by Elena Belotti, a brilliant book about the way girls, through home and school education, are turned into little women, translated from the Italian by Lisa. We also published the Irish writer Neil Jordan’s first collection of stories, Night in Tunisia.

  Glenn, an extraordinary, charismatic, self-educated man from Harlem who came to Britain in 1968, gave the job of production to me. I eagerly agreed and depended on printers and typesetters to learn how to make a book. Despite the fact that Writers and Readers often struggled to pay their bills on time, the printers (all mainstream) were kind and giving, with lovely reps who really wanted to help. Our typesetters were not at all mainstream: they did cheap book typesetting for radical presses such as ours on the side. Their main work was producing the International Marxist Group newspaper from a basement in Islington, which I would often visit. One of the other young people working at Writers and Readers at the time was the late Gary Pulsifer, who went on to found his own publishing house, Arcadia. Many years later at Virago I had the pleasure of publishing Lisa Appignanesi.

  When I came home to my shared house in Tufnell Park with tales of my days, one of my flatmates wisely gave me a copy of ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’ by Jo Freeman, a 1971 article which looked at the way in which feminist groups were creating groups without leaders and making structures flat and equal. She very clearly showed that structurelessness is ‘a way of masking power’. In any group, informal and therefore unaccountable, she wrote, leaders will emerge. Interestingly, she argued that only when structure is formalized—even if it is flatter than the typical hierarchies—only then can it be subject to democratic scrutiny.