In 1973, a group of pioneering young women started a publishing company
with the aim of changing the way the world saw women...
My pants...
ruined! And it's all your fault.
..and how women saw themselves.
I've got to meet Tom on a big business deal.
Now here we have...looks to me like The New Yorker.
"Stop moaning and get on with the story.
"Women, and especially women writers,
"have no use for destiny.
"They wouldn't compose a Hamlet if they could."
SHE LAUGHS
One of them said about Alice Munroe,
"Well, you might be a good short story writer,
"but I don't want to go to bed with you."
Women won the right to vote in 1929,
but even by the '70s,
women struggled to be taken seriously.
I want to tell you, you have beautiful eyes.
The male gaze was often directed below the neck.
It was a man's world,
women were not even meant to be interested in the news.
You know, there were no women newsreaders.
I mean, I can remember we used to get very strange looks.
Women didn't go into pubs, and couldn't get a mortgage.
Whenever I got my tax return from the Government,
it always had a headline,
"If you have a husband, this form is addressed to him."
Can you believe that? That's right. Yes...
Young women entering publishing
were rarely given the power to make decisions.
A lot of publishing was like a gentlemen's club.
Your typical joiner was
a highly-educated woman
with at least one degree from a top university,
and who was also willing to type.
The issue of women being silenced and being invisible was huge.
We just weren't being heard
because nobody was listening.
Women were writing in a man's world.
Virago took women into their own world,
and their own perspective.
We were all learning to give ourselves the validity
to realise that we could run companies,
we could make decisions,
we could demand equal pay.
And we lived with those sort of men, particularly,
who would be amazed if you said, "Up yours."
I always wanted to change the world, it simply wasn't good enough.
You have to fight.
This is the story of how Virago changed the world.
One page at a time.
There was nothing you could do, really, in my world,
of book publishing, except do publicity and marketing.
And the reason they wanted you to do publicity is that they chose...
If you were adequate-looking,
you'd be sent out to flirt with journalists
and get coverage in newspapers.
There was a particularly nauseating old man
who used to put his hand on your rather plump thigh,
and stuff like that.
Oh!
Nobody ever told you you could run anything.
The media was aggressively male.
There was a culture of alcoholism,
of drink, of cigarettes,
and indeed of exploiting women.
I'd go along on to a sales conference... Well...
any old man used to think he could get you into bed.
It was like the wolves were on the loose.
By that time, say 1970,
I was 32,
and I'd had a good eight years
living in the working world.
And that would turn anybody into a raving feminist in those days.
Girls, would you please turn?
WOLF WHISTLE
The proceedings have been temporarily suspended...
I am very, very happy to be here at this cattle market, tonight.
AUDIENCE LAUGH Moo!
People often ask me if we were influenced by
American feminism and things like that,
but I felt influenced by you two.
And I think there was a sort of blast of the can-do-ism going on, you know?
We all felt we could do things. Completely. Completely.
I felt I could do anything.
We had no money to pay for a publicist.
Oh, did I do it for free? So, you were... Yes.
I definitely remember saying to you,
"I think what you're doing is so wonderful,
"I want to do it for books."
And that's when I went to see John Boothe and said,
"I want you to finance it."
I went to one of the four men who ran Quartet, and I said,
"Look, what I want to do is have my own publishing imprint,
"and I want it to be a feminist publishing imprint,
"publish women's writing so that they get a more fair crack of the whip
"in EVERY way."
My immediate reaction was that it was an interesting idea,
and absolutely timely,
because "Women's Lib",
as it was called then, was very much a big issue.
Cos the concept of "wife" isn't some sure concept.
It presupposes a whole way of life that we haven't even discussed yet.
What are you doing at a women's liberation conference?
The whole thing was so exhausting... Wasn't it?
Cos we were changing ourselves from inside out, and the way we...
Patterns of thought. But this is what feminists, feminism was doing.
It was. We took that phrase, "The personal is political,"
which was, for me,
incredibly important, because it was how you lived,
who did the shopping, who did the cooking.
I mean, did you have sexual rights, and rights to say no?
They were really big things.
I was a latecomer to feminism.
The stereotypes of...
femininity were firmly embedded in my head, I think.
Passivity.
Conformity, to some extent.
That's me. Yes.
'I didn't have ambitions to have a career at all. Not at all.'
What is that? I think that's you, isn't it? Yes, it is me.
On a demonstration. And are you there, is she in there?
No, no, because... There am I in the corner.
This one is Marsha Rowe
holding the Spare Rib banner, which...
And there were we...
Abortion. That was the abortion march, isn't it? Yes.
This is me and Lynne Segal and Hermione Harris.
I went to a women's movement meeting,
at Sheila Rowbotham's house,
and I just thought it sounded interesting, and I went along.
And it was a revelation.
I think we were talking about work, women and work.
And I just remember this feeling of intensity in the room.
And passion.
And being a person who responded a lot
to intensity and passion, I thought it was just great.
Actually, we did really find it interesting
talking about things like Simone de Beauvoir En Ingles. We did.
But we were always worried... And Havelock Ellis and Olive Schreiner.
We felt, "We are not a PROPER conciousness-raising group..."
We weren't. ..because the theory of the consciousness-raising group
was that you were meant to bring
your personal life into the group. Yup.
I remember some nights, there were suddenly huge revelations.
I remember a night talking about
which of us had been raped, or attempted rape... Yeah.
And I'd say of the 11 people there, or whatever it was,
seven of them had either been raped or had attempted rape.
When I started the company, it was called Spare Rib Books,
and I then I changed the title,
and I had a whole row of thesauruses, you know.
Gods of the world, monsters of the world, kings of the world.
And we didn't like any of the goddesses. Diana... No.
And you saw Virago.
And then we looked up its meaning. Yes.
"Fury, harpy, harridan, hussy, muckraker..."
"Scold, she-devil..." "Tigress..."
"..spitfire..." "..vituperator..." "..witch..."
"..vixen, hench.." "..an heroic woman."
Heroic, and also the feeling that it was a slightly stroppy person.
Yes, stroppy, heroic woman. I love that. Fit you down to a T.
THEY LAUGH
What we had in common, completely,
was our desire to give women
the opportunity to write,
express their thoughts, publish books and, more important I think,
to realise that they had a history of their own.
I think we were reluctant to just take on more work.
You had no time at all. This was '74.
There's an ad... Oh, look at that.
..for Virago, announcing that we'll come out the next year.
Isn't that marvellous?
She was looking for someone. So we had lunch.
Ursula. She was the serious one,
and the one who had the academic contacts.
The historians, and the wonderful women who were writing
and researching women's history at the time.
I think she gave us feminists... What would you call it?
Credentials.
I started doing sort of freelance...
unpaid work.
That's Smith Street, where I started Virago.
That was the photograph of the three of us.
There's Harriet...
moi, and Ursula.
The first job I did was
working for Carmen Callil,
who absolutely knew her worth.
I only knew publicity and marketing.
I knew nothing about finance,
cash flow, profit and loss. Nothing.
And I had to teach myself.
And that was lovely. I loved doing that.
I thought the bank manager would have a seizure when I asked him
for an overdraft. And um...
I had to get two men to guarantee the overdraft, two businessmen.
Which was easily done. I couldn't get it for myself.
Well, you can't start any car without the spark!
Carmen and I went to have tea at the Ritz with Bob Gavron,
and he agreed a £25,000 guarantee,
so not money, but a guarantee.
# One lump or two I won't need any
# Your sweetness will do... #
That's what they sent you to school and university for.
Flutter your eyelashes, "Would you mind guaranteeing my
"overdraft at Barclays Bank, so I can bring down the world?"
SHE LAUGHS
INTERVIEWER: Did you ever put any of your own money in? Yes. Yes, yes.
What we all did is to
put our houses... Insane, really...
Our mortgages on the line.
That was insane, I had a two-year-old child.
That was what the flat looked like.
This is the room...
In the evenings we would sit around and drink red wine and read things.
So, you know, we started reading manuscripts.
And Carmen had already started commissioning manuscripts.
I don't know why people were always taking the cats.
The very first book was Fenwomen.
It's an old history of the women who lived in this particular
Cambridgeshire village in the Fens.
"The pressure for village girls to marry is strong.
"They marry young and many have families by the time they are 20.
"But although the dream of married bliss may fade rapidly,
"with his night out with the boys, and her fourth-hand washing machine,
"divorce in the village is unheard of.
"Child-rearing, the great unacknowledged profession,
"is entirely her responsibility."
One of the stories, one of the many that I recorded,
of a women who had nine children,
who had nothing to eat.
Absolutely nothing to give them.
Nothing.
The News of the World was disgraceful.
"A dirty trick has been played on the women of Isleham.
"Suddenly, some of their most private feelings and opinions
"are held up to public ridicule and amusement.
"It's little more than a peepshow," it says here.
I liked this one, that understood what you were really trying to do.
"Women who kept 20 children on 10 bob a week." Nothing has changed...
Yeah. ..but, still, that's what the book was about. I mean, these were women...
It was about survival.
Feminism itself, it's still a dirty word, in a way.
I certainly was a dirty word in the '70s.
Carmen Callil - "Why should history belong to men?"
They photographed me in front of a dart board,
with my mouth open.
I mean, unbelievable! We were fair game.
This was the first book
of a feminist publishing house.
Maybe we didn't...expect it,
but that's what happened. They put as all down.
"Bra-burning, men-hating women's libbers."
We did 12 books the first year.
I remember that, because at the first press conference
a man put up his hand at the back of the room and said,
"How are you going to find enough books for next year?"
We produced the first books because Harriet,
who was the star of the whole enterprise,
taught herself production. Amazing.
That's an abiding memory.
Of unpacking the books as they just arrived,
in the binder's parcels of 40,
and seeing if...
the cover and everything had worked.
That was absolutely, em...
..a, you know, top moment,
cos there was a lot of anxiety.
Angela Carter, the novelist and writer,
wrote a book for me which was called The Sadeian Woman.
But I think I paid her...£25.
And so she couldn't write it for years, because she didn't
have any money either, so that it waited and waited.
The Sadeian Woman I remember being huge, actually.
Because, when I think about it now, it was ahead of its time, you know.
She was giving a feminist reappraisal of the Marquis de Sade,
the last person you would think that
a feminist could find any kind of sympathy with.
By 1976, I thought we needed an office.
They were in Soho.
Land of strip clubs.
So, you went up the stairs...
lump, lump, lump, lump...
and on the bottom there was a massage parlour, so...
as you went up the stairs you were sort of eyed,
because people, of course, would think,
"What are all those women going up the stairs for?"
It certainly wasn't as bright and white, was it? No, nor clean.
It was really dingy, and much bigger.
We just had one big room,
and all of us worked in it together.
With me being a tyrant.
Carmen, Ursula and myself were there.
Alexandra Pringle joined,
and... Lennie, wonderfully, wrote saying,
"Would Carmen like any help with publicity?"
I was given the grand title, "Publicity Manager",
which, frankly, meant typing labels.
I think you sat here. You sat here. Well, you sat there.
I had two different times. And Carmen sat there, did she?
Over there. In the sort of Jacuzzi.
They had three typewriters and it was...
TYPES ON TABLE ..it was crazy, really.
URSULA: It was so quick on those electric typewriters.
I think quicker than on anything I've ever done since.
LENNIE: 'It was incredibly orderly.'
Very hard-working.
I did have a motor car, terrible old banger.
And I'd go around delivering everything by hand to people
to save the post.
Oh, stay up all night and do it, you know?
You've got to get the light bulbs...
loo paper.
Then I'd go and sign up an author.
We didn't earn a lot of money. We didn't pay each other much.
For years.
And everybody had to work extraordinary long hours.
And some of them had children.
It was difficult.
INTERVIEWER: What was Carmen like to work for?
She's famously pictured as being
difficult to work for... Um...
She was not easy, that is true.
You think, "What the fuck are you doing, you idiot?"
And in England they would say this is an absolute nightmare that
I said this to a...
"You said that to a young woman who worked for you?"
And I would say,
"Why is it she's inferior to me because she's working for me?
"She can tell me to fuck off."
ALEXANDRA: Do you remember you used to often go and dictate your letters in the lavatory? Yes.
And I used to go in and you'd be sitting there, dictating away!
And we had some poor woman, didn't we?
And I remember once you did it on the roof,
and the gust of wind took your correspondence away,
and you said, "Alexandra, Alexandra, get up here!"
And I had this really tight skirt... As ever.
..and I had to climb out, and I was dashing round these rooftops
picking up your correspondence!
SHE LAUGHS
Carmen was the managing director,
and she wanted things
to be pretty much her way,
and sometimes there were arguments about it,
and tensions about it.
INTERVIEWER: I have heard some stories of people crying in the toilets.
Crying in the toilets. I cried in the toilets, too.
I mean, everybody dished it out.
And I think my personality was very, very...
tyrannical when it came to making sure the company survived,
and that the authors
and books were served properly,
and to get their work out there.
What I think was miraculous
about the Virago Modern Classics
is that, until they came along,
we women who read,
we didn't understand our own history,
our own fiction history.
We might have known Virginia Woolf and
Jane Austen and George Eliot
and the Brontes and so on,
but there were a lot of gaps in between those.
I started the classics list cos somebody gave me Frost In May.
And when I read it, it was the story of my life in the convent.
It's about a little girl who writes a vivid novel,
and the nuns come across it,
and they think it's full of sin,
and she's expelled from school.
And she's destroyed for life by this.
This is when the Mother Superior comes in,
the Mother Superior dressed in black with her wimple.
"I told you once before that every will must be broken completely.
"Nanda glanced at the nun's face. It was pale and controlled as usual,
"yet lighted with an extraordinary, quiet exultation.
"'Mother, mother, won't you give me one more chance?' Nanda begged, suddenly.
"The nun appeared to think for a minute, then kindly she said,
"'No, my dear.'"
Joyless.
And when they see joy in children, they take it away.
That's what Frost In May was about. Death of the soul.
And I thought, "I've got to think of a way of publishing fiction."
Week after week, you were reading these remarkable stories by
very polished stylists,
coming at the world from a very different point of view.
Telling you about bits of 19th or 20th century history that you
hadn't heard before, from a female perspective.
And realising, a bit like a pointillist painting,
that all of these dots had been missing from the canvas.
This is from Henry Handel Richardson's Maurice Guest,
which is one of my favourite...
Virago Modern Classics.
"He was very happy and very unhappy, by turns - never at rest.
"If he imagined she had looked observantly at him
"as she passed, he was elated for hours after."
They branded it, they were green, it was...
And it's very difficult to create a brand from nothing, and they did.
"His self-consciousness was so peculiarly intensified that
"his surroundings ceased to exist for him -
"they two were the gigantic figures on a shadow background."
She's a classic example, E Arnot Robinson.
Two wonderful novels.
The doing of reprints and the uncovering of already published
things that had disappeared was as exciting as new books.
There was Elizabeth Taylor, there was Rosamond Lehmann,
there was Antonia White, there were so many of them.
They went back to the past, uncovering these astonishingly
good books which, for whatever reason, had been neglected.
Finding the jacket was enthralling,
so Carmen and I used to go around the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition every year,
and I'd be there with my notebook, and she was not interested in
seeing anything unless it was interesting for a Virago Modern Classics cover.
And so she was like, "No, no, no, no. Yes, that one."
So I'd note it down so I knew which one it was.
"He lost touch with reality and dreamed dreams of imperceptible
"threads, finer than any gossamer,
"which could be spun from soul to soul without the need of speech."
That's a description of obsessive love
which I absolutely adore, having experienced it certain times myself.
A most painful emotion. Never to be repeated.
But it's a perfect description of it.
Today, I'm going to be speaking to Jo Kingham, who is one of the...
Who is the daughter of one of the best-loved writers on the Virago
Modern Classics list, Elizabeth Taylor.
Your mother, in her lifetime, was admired by many writers, and
Kingsley Amis said she was one of the best English novelists born this century.
Do you feel that she's as recognised,
she was as recognised then as she is today? No, I don't think she was.
I think she'd be astonished, thanks to Virago,
who have published everything and kept her on the shelves in all
the bookshops, and I think as the family,
we owe a huge debt to Virago, but I think she would have been thrilled.
You just need to put these books into people's hands,
you need to make them look...
You need to make them look fresh again and like something that
you'd... That a contemporary audience would enjoy.
And would relate to.
We've all had that thing, people saying... You go to parties, you say you worked at Virago, people say,
"You don't look like a feminist." "And you're not wearing dungarees."
Everybody thought, "She's gone to Virago, she's got short hair.
"Oh, she's become a lesbian."
I remember ringing a newspaper, possibly even the Guardian,
and said, "We've got so-and-so."
And they said, "Oh, we had a woman last week. In the feature.
"We featured a woman last week."
'I think when you want to change the status quo in England,
'you've got enemies, really, haven't you?
'But one is definitely the British press.'
I love Kate O'Brien. Let's get her out.
'Anthony Burgess really dominated the Observer.
'When he wrote a review of one of our books,'
it was Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, and he said,
"This is astonishing, it's so wonderful that it's back in print.
"Sort of predates Joyce for a stream of consciousness.
"Too bad it had to be published by those sows."
Leonora Carrington was the one that Alexandra loved.
"By no stretch of usage can Virago be made not to signify shrew,
"a scold, an ill-tempered woman,
"unless we go back to the etymology, a man-like maiden."
She's wonderful.
"It is an unlovely and aggressive name.
"Even for a militant, feminist organisation.
"And it presides awkwardly over the reissue of a great roman-fleuve,
"which is too important to be associated with chauvinist sows."
Oh!
I think it's because they thought of feminists as a race apart.
And I think that was one of the biggest problems, really.
INTERVIEWER: What kind of response were you getting from readers?
Oh, my God, amazing.
Bag loads. Letters from teachers saying,
"I really want to talk about feminism in the class,
"I want to change the curriculum, I would like more women...
"Please send me posters."
You'd get women's groups, from the WI,
right through to radical feminist groups who wanted a speaker to come.
It opened so many doors for readers.
People would go into bookshops and ask for the next Virago book.
Virago wanted to be mainstream.
You know, we were always set up not to be niche,
to be on the high street. This was Carmen's idea.
And Ursula's, too. But I really stayed with that we represent 53%
of the population, we want everyone to read our books.
And we might publish from the margins, but we are not marginal.
That wasn't always popular in the kind of more radical ends of
feminism in the '70s and '80s.
Have you not read this book? No, I haven't. One of the best Virago writers, I'm told.
There wasn't one feminism, there were many, many feminisms.
The women's movement in the '70s, I think, was dominated by white,
middle-class, mostly heterosexual women.
And there were quite a lot of women who started to resent that,
I think, and felt their interests as black women or working-class
women or lesbians, you know, were not being represented and so they
wanted to have, and they did have, their own groups.
I think there'd been a very romantic view earlier on
about sisterhood, that somehow we could all work together,
we were all women, and we were united by that.
But in '78, at what turned out to be the last conference,
there was a lot of booing and shouting.
And there was that recognition that it no longer became tenable
to really keep a kind of national, collective organisation together.
There always were different views of feminism from day one.
We commissioned a book, which never got written, called Feminisms,
because people often don't understand,
there are just so many different forms.
Ursula was very much connected with what I called the
North London Socialist lot of feminists.
And a lot of them were academics and they had done
a lot of research already, so we did some wonderful history reprints.
The non-fiction books Ursula was doing were trailblazing.
I always remember the one about Asian women in Britain, because
I'd had that room in Whitechapel and I had seen these,
you know, the Bangladeshi women in their sweatshops and been
very concerned by them, and this amazing woman called Amrit Wilson
wrote this book called Finding A Voice.
It caused a sensation and the author got death threats from men in
her community.
It was really sort of breaking open what was, you know,
what was behind closed doors.
Right at that moment, in the early '80s,
was when the backlash against various liberal ideas
started to kick in.
And people were saying that they wanted to get women back into
their homes and into a traditional, quote, lifestyle.
One should really think of one's family and one's children first,
one's husband and children. And this seems to be a very...
.."uncontemporary" view to hold.
"The spectacles women used to make of themselves,
"oiling themselves like roast meat on a spit, and bare backs and
"shoulders, on the streets, in public, and legs, not even stockings on them.
"No wonder those things used to happen.
"Things, the word she used when whatever it stood for was too
"distasteful or filthy or horrible to pass her lips."
Well, I was reading, in my 20s, Lady Oracle, The Edible Woman
and then Cat's Eye, and The Handmaid's Tale in particular,
which I remember for me and my group of friends,
my women friends, and my men friends, actually, was this
absolutely kind of electrifying, sort of horrible dystopia.
People were saying, "Well, isn't this based on Muslims etc?"
And I would say, "Cast your view backwards just a bit
"and you will find the situation in which women couldn't own property
"if they were married, they didn't get the kids if there was divorce.
"There was a great debate about whether they should be
"allowed higher education because it might shrivel up their wombs.
"So all of this was going on right here, not so long ago."
One of the things I think you have to do when you're Virago is
be alive to whatever the political issues of the time are.
So we have to be a mirror to the world.
Marie. I'm such a huge fan. Thank you.
I was coming out as a young lesbian in the '80s.
And so entering that world of gay activism, really,
joining groups, discovering the power of sort of community
politics and grassroot politics.
When I think of the '80s, I think of it as, that was its strength, really.
It was a lot of grassroots work.
The two sort of movements that were working very strongly in the
'70s and the '80s were the peace movement and the
women's movement, and in fact, things like Greenham Common,
we did books about Greenham Common.
And we went off to Greenham Common, a lot of us, and circled the base.
Very exciting.
Over Our Dead Bodies was a book of essays put together by
Dorothy Thompson.
Over Our Dead Bodies: Women Against The Bomb.
What we decided to do, which was quite exciting, was take...
Is to hire Westminster Hall.
And to have a huge meeting to celebrate the publication of
the book. And I can't imagine that we did do it,
but I think we got 2,000 people there. We were very ambitious.
I mean, I remain ambitious for our books, too,
but we felt so much part of the movements in the world,
and so naturally... It felt totally natural that we would have
a rally to publish this book.
When I think about that, I think, "Really?"
It's like Kleenex, I can't imagine how people survived
without Kleenex before it was invented.
I can't imagine how I survived without Virago,
before it was invented.
When I got there, the turnover was under £300,000,
and three years later when I left, it was just about £1 million.
Carmen was moving to Chatto, she had accepted the job as
managing director and she wanted to bring Virago with her.
The company became worth quite a lot of money.
So it was a good time to sell it.
I said I wouldn't leave without Virago, and so Virago came with me,
but it did cause a ferocious row with Ursula.
Harriet and I didn't want to become part of Chatto.
Because we felt it was an independent company...
and that it should stay that way.
A small publisher was becoming a pretty impossible financial thing.
The whole of publishing was changing.
There was no way a small publishing house could do the
sales distribution into the digital age, which was only a dream then.
To survive, Virago had to join a bigger group.
That was a difficult year.
We had lots of difficult battles.
Certainly, we recreated the convent.
What, you felt you recreated the convent at Virago?
When I... By the time... 1982, I felt I had, yeah.
Disapproval.
Mortal sins.
Venial sins.
It was poignant because there was an ending
and there was a new beginning.
We did keep Virago a separate entity and that was important.
Carmen continued on the board,
and she continued working on the Virago Modern Classics,
so I continued working with her.
MUSIC: I've Seen That Face Before by Grace Jones
# Sans regret, sans melo
# La porte est claquee
# Joel est barre... #
Is the common thread in people who have managed to do something
whether it's artistic or creative,
force of personality to push something through? Carmen?
I just don't know. I think I...
As I get older, I do think perhaps I do have a strong personality.
So it may be that. But living with it is beginning to exhaust me.
LAUGHTER So, that may be right.
But I don't think when you're doing something
you think that you're successful or that you have a strong personality
or anything, you just get on with it.
When we all began, we were secretaries or publicity girls.
By the '80s or '90s we were all in very big jobs.
Ladies, gentlemen, young men, young women,
I encourage you...
..with all my heart...
to strive...
to be bigger, stronger, healthier.
Dare.
Dare. Thank you.
APPLAUSE
Ursula Owen heard about Maya Angelou
and heard about I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings,
which had been published in America, 1969.
MAYA ANGELOU: "Wouldn't they be surprised when one day
"I woke out of my black ugly dream
"and my real hair, which was long and blonde,
"would take the place of the kinky mass
"that Momma wouldn't let me straighten?"
According to Maya,
it was sent to a lot of publishing houses in the UK
and they all said, "No, nobody in the UK is going to be interested
"in a young black woman growing up in the South, so, no."
"Then they would understand why I had never picked up
"a Southern accent,
"or spoke the common slang,
"and why I had to be forced to eat pigs' tails and snouts.
"And because a cruel fairy stepmother,
"who was understandably jealous of my beauty,
"had turned me into a too-big Negro girl
"with nappy black hair, broad feet
"and a space between her teeth that would hold a number-two pencil."
I think Maya brought us poetry,
although we didn't realise that was what was happening to us,
because it wasn't in verse.
Its unputdownable quality
is the fact that you are constantly
led straight into another cadence in that book.
In 1984, Ursula bought it
and Maya Angelou came over
and it was amazing, it was utterly amazing.
I remember, because she was six foot four or five,
and she came into our quite small offices and she danced!
We printed 6,000 copies. They were gone in a fortnight.
We printed 6,000 more and they were gone in another fortnight.
And we suddenly realised we had this huge bestseller on our hands.
Maya made them. I mean, they turned some shekels after that.
but I can't remember exactly when it was, what year.
So, it would have been 1985 and 1986 when I was...
a Rhodes Scholar here in Oxford
and you let me have an internship...
We had a series of Rhodes Scholars.
We had quite a few of them, but I do remember
this young, very beautiful, woman.
Naomi certainly stood out.
She kept wanting to have a conversation about beauty,
you know, the tyranny of beauty and things like that.
And we all thought, "OK, whatever." You know.
And then off she went and wrote The Beauty Myth.
Nice when you're crouching down there.
Yes, gosh, very aggressive. CAMERA CLICKS
And there. Yes.
NAOMI WOLF: There was a lot of that kind of constant...demeaning sexism.
The newspapers were very misogynistic.
There was no sexual harassment law protecting them,
so their experiences at work were awful.
Um, and every week you would read an essay
in a British newspaper declaring that feminism was dead.
And really, when you think about it, if you've got looks,
I don't think there's anything silly in using them.
I was writing about anorexia and body image,
and images of beauty, which were
kind of the problem that had no name for my generation of women,
of my demographic.
Success. Publicity tour around the world.
I mean, I was very fortunate.
And I'd been very well-prepared.
You know, and Virago was a big part of that.
I was immediately cast in the role of, you know,
baby feminist spokeswoman.
You did something that the cultural gatekeepers said
wasn't possible at the time.
I remember the buzzword in magazines and periodicals in the '80s
is "feminism is dead, no-one's interested."
And you were creating a business model
showing that there was a market for these ideas.
And that, in fact, is really important in terms of publishing
cos it did tell other publishers that there was an appetite there
that was not being satisfied. Well, exactly.
Once we were part of a bigger group, we lost our profitability,
and of course one of the things that Carmen always said
is that you have to be profitable,
which is something I believe in very much.
MUSIC: Avalon by Roxy Music
# Now the party's over... #
Chatto started to go bankrupt.
If you didn't have your own paperback imprint, it was hopeless.
That's how much publishing was changing.
I think it became obvious that the companies were quite badly run
by the men who ran them and then it became obvious that
all the companies were losing money, except for Virago.
So that was a bit ironic.
If you look at the history of publishing,
all publishing was just being, you know,
munched up by bigger organisations.
We said, "We still want to buy ourselves out,"
and there was a big battle,
which we won by saying we'd all leave.
It was interesting.
There was a great deal of disaffection
and it was basically like,
"Sod this, let's leave these men and let's go back out on our own."
So we...we did the buyout.
We all had to put some money in.
It was something like £10,000 or something each.
Were you all in agreement that this was the right thing to do? Yes.
We were. I mean, I didn't want to do it for my life,
but I was in agreement that we should do it.
I had Daniel, and it was
the last thing I wanted in my life.
I just... I knew that it was going to be all-consuming, and it was.
And...you know, I had to write the business plan with Ursula,
go to tea with the venture capitalists and the accountants
and all the rest of it,
you know, outside of ordinary working hours.
# Avalon... #
I was brought up like that, that you, you know,
you do not sacrifice your work.
# Avalon... #
It was hard.
And to be frank, in a different circumstance
I think I would have had another child, but, you know,
I couldn't manage the balance.
# Avalon... #
Virago bought itself out and I helped with that as well.
So they became an independent company again.
It was a very bonding time. We were all working very much together.
It was... It was great.
In the early days of feminism, women really wanted to be educated,
so we could publish a lot of women's history.
Everybody was really hungry to know, "who were these women before,
"who has got forgotten, what did they do, what were their names?"
All sorts of things. And that kind of went away slightly in the '90s.
There was a feeling, I think, that it had been done -
what's your problem?
And there was all sorts of feelings that feminism has gone too far,
or, you know, feminism has actually wrecked relationships
between men and women.
There was a kind of a backlash, I think, about the gains of feminism.
Lad mags came along.
It was a very leering time.
It was a hard time, because you had to take all of this
in a kind of cheery spirit. You know, you had to sort of go,
"Oh, ho-ho - Loaded."
Feminism wasn't cool any more. You know, it wasn't radical.
It had become quite academic and it was talking to itself quite a lot.
I'd just say that I'm one of the lads. Just carry on.
I give as good as I get. I don't let them categorise me like that.
There was a younger generation of women who grew up thinking
there were no barriers to their success,
that their gender brought them.
And they could drink like the men and swear like the men
and take their clothes off, you know.
And I think that had a profound effect on feminism.
There were so many of us who felt, "Actually, it's not over,
"The language is still sexist,
"women are still not been paid the right amount of money."
I was working on a show called The Late Show on BBC Two,
and we covered a shortlist for one of the Booker years.
And to our astonishment,
I think there were no women on the list that year.
And in particular, there was not Angela Carter,
who had published a book -
I think it was Wise Children - that many of us had read and loved.
And I think the sort of sense of, "Oh, my God,
"how far have we not come that this could still be true?"
It was, of course, a joke at the time.
"If size matters, we'll have a bigger prize pot
"than the Booker will."
NEWS BROADCAST: A price-cutting war is looming in the book world
after the Dillons chain of booksellers
put many of its new titles on sale today at a 25% discount.
Tonight several publishers are taking out injunctions
to stop Dillons discounting.
'There was an industry wobble and books were harder to sell.'
NEWS BROADCAST: Dillons said their discounted books were selling
at five times the normal rate.
There were more of them,
so you had to fight harder for your share in the market.
You know, the kind of girl power, ladette brand of feminism
didn't sit very squarely with reading books, particularly.
The '90s was hard, and Virago...struggled.
By the time we got to '95,
we definitely were not going to be able to last all by ourselves.
I said that we were going to sell the company
and so we sold the company, and various people wanted to buy.
The choice was between Bloomsbury and Little, Brown.
You know about that? I've come across it.
Must have been a very difficult decision for everyone to make.
SHE SIGHS
Absolutely.
So we had this great...
terrible...moment when we all declared...
But I didn't have a vote by then. I'd sold my shares.
Listen, one day I'll write a play about it.
The split went - Ursula and Harriet and Alexandra,
and Lennie and me.
Ursula and I both felt it should go to Bloomsbury.
And I had to choose, and I chose Little, Brown.
I had a background in small publishing myself.
And the smaller the cheese, the more ferocious the mice.
I was very, very against corporate publishing.
And I felt it was wrong for Virago.
I wanted to get...
..into a company where Lennie could run it.
It was a bit of a... a bit of a mess.
After that...that meeting, I remember seeing Tim Waterstone,
who was a non-exec on the Virago board and he said,
"I've been on many boards, and I am on many boards,
"and I've never seen people behave as badly as you all did."
And I looked at him and I said,
"But what you have to understand is we're a family."
'I understand that they did a television programme some years ago
'in which they displayed infighting.'
Frankly, darling, you're too fucking boring.
They loved the idea of a catfight, or things going wrong.
Probably a feeling that..."Maybe women can't really do it."
You know.
Everything else, all emotions, get in the way and things like that.
The personal is the political. That's all we have to remember.
Big Women was a sort of parody. Was it? Yeah.
'It's very forgettable, isn't it? I've forgotten it completely.
'I don't know that that's that forgettable.'
Some dancing happens and you all take your tops off.
INTERVIEWER LAUGHS
Medusa.
One look and she turns men's hearts to stone.
Medusa!
I wouldn't have dreamt of exposing my breasts to anyone... I'm sure.
..in public.
THEY LAUGH
We decided to throw a big party and we made carrier bags saying,
"You can't put a big woman down." And we just had a good time with it.
What they gained from the sale was financial security,
greater marketing clout,
and if you look at the remainder of the feminist publishing houses
that were set up in the '70s,
none of them were in business by that time.
Virago remains the only kind of... explicitly feminist publisher
in the industry.
When we first came to Little, Brown,
there was a lot of conversation about how to sort of pep up Virago,
how to kind of give it a new lease of life.
We started a new list called Virago V.
There was a sort of sense that we had to fly in the face of
political correctness, being worthy, all those kinds of things.
So Virago V was supposed to be... provocative.
Nobody else would have me, basically.
Nobody else would publish it.
But I have to say, I was absolutely delighted.
"It was a scent which as a girl I loved uncritically.
"Later I heard it described, by theatre managers and artistes,
"as the smell of laughter,
"the very odour of applause.
"Later still, I came to know it as the essence, not of pleasure,
"but of grief."
Sarah was not the first to introduce lesbian protagonists.
Jeanette Winterson had, obviously, among others,
had done, you know, her amazing book, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.
And it was like lesbian... A bit like in the old sense,
Queen Victoria's idea that it didn't really exist.
You know, it was kind of very off-centre.
And what someone like Sarah did is kind of, basically,
she just makes lesbianism ordinary.
Virago Vs - books with bite.
In the '90s, I think people did feel you couldn't have conversations,
polemics certainly, and even... women's history, I felt,
you couldn't just do in the same way as you had
in the early days of Virago.
And memoir seemed to be a new way forward.
And so I remember one of the books I'm extremely proud of publishing
is called Desert Flower by Waris Dirie.
She's a model from Somalia,
who suddenly revealed to a women's magazine in America
which is now called female genital mutilation.
And nobody was talking about that.
Because it's got integrity, Virago is successful.
If it started saying, "Oh, well, we can have a little sub-imprint
"that does boy-meets-girl romances,"
I think everyone would think that Virago is selling out,
and it would be much less successful.
So there is absolutely no impetus from me or from anyone else
for Virago to do anything other than stick to its guns.
I remember when we published Natasha Walter's book,
Living Dolls: The Return Of Sexism,
which was picking up on some of this stuff
that was feeling like, "Why hasn't the world changed?
"Why do we still have so... Still the problems?
"Why are girls still told that
"their bodies are their passport to success?"
We were just ready to be jumped upon, and we got one bad review.
Everything else was just,
"Yes! Thankfully, someone is talking about this!"
A lot of books suddenly sprang up.
Caitlin Moran's, How To Be A Woman.
Laura Bates - Everyday Sexism.
Suddenly the conversation was alive again,
especially for young women.
The book is another way to talk about feminism.
In it, everyone is talking about different versions,
it's all personal stories. It's very accessible...
I Call Myself A Feminist is picking up on sort of the sense of
young women now kind of arguing about feminism. "Am I a feminist?
"Can I be this but not have that name?"
Or, you know, "I do call myself a feminist."
It's such an interesting conversation going on
with young women under 30, I think.
"I call myself a feminist with my body.
"So much communication is non-verbal.
"We proclaim ourselves confident as we power down the street
"with a straight back, unafraid to be visible.
"We try to hide our vulnerability when we are uncomfortable, when..."
'I feel more optimistic now than I have ever felt,
'possibly back to sort of how I felt when I first found feminism
'in the end of the '70s.
'Because I feel these young women,
'they have a strong sense of themselves, it seems to me.
'They're also not frightened.'
"Growing up... Well, I don't remember becoming a woman,
"but I do remember when I stopped being a girl.
"My memory is blurred from the Malibu,
"but I remember them holding me up because I couldn't stand.
"One under either arm and a few others in the background.
"One laughing, one keeping lookout.
"The smell of clean, fresh blood that I woke up to at 5am.
"I started to drink till I blacked out, to make it all less difficult.
"By my 20s, I'd learned that alcohol is less difficult than family.
"Feminism always has been and is still the only place
"I feel that it's OK that I'm difficult."
Things go and come, they go and come.
So the first wave got the vote.
Second wave, end of '60s,
out of the housewife mould.
This wave, if you ask young women, it's about violence.
Violence, rape and death.
They're wonderful.
I'll see if I can get these posters into shape
for the British Library.
There's the most wonderful Elizabeth Taylor.
Oh!
Christina Stead,
the most disagreeable of all the writers I ever published.
Why have I got two of her?
But she was a genius.
Tell me why you've decided to give your Virago collection
to the British Library?
Is this about putting everything to rest a little bit?
I don't think so. I'm not a very restful person.
Um, I just want people to know how it was.
And also, of course, I've been ill.
And once you're ill, you do all these things.
Oh, she was wonderful, Storm Jameson.
'Once I had lung cancer, I set about... You know, I made a will.'
Stevie Smith! My favourite.
'I did a power of attorney
'so that they turn off the machine INSTANTLY.
'And I got my archive together and it's gone to the British Library.'
Obviously, there are a lot more women being published these days.
Do you feel that Virago still has a place?
I think Virago is now an august old lady.
And she's still functioning extremely well,
with a lot of things to say.
And why would you ever want to kill off an august old lady?
When I look back on it now and I think of the disputes we had
and the stress there was, it's all very understandable,
because it was such a difficult thing to do.
These are something I've forgotten. I'm so sorry.
They were under the bed.
It's brilliant to get the final pieces of the Carmen Callil archive.
Do you feel it's an important part
of our national heritage?
I think that's a bit boastful.
I think it's part of women's history. And when...
And I think women's history is very, very important.
More important than kings and queens.
So, yes, I suppose I do, really.
But it's not just about me, you know,
it was a whole body of women all over the country.
They achieved an enormous amount for the next generation.
That's very charming. I can't wait to see the apple.
The apple on the spine. Yes.
We came out of a place where people were silenced.
And that isn't quite true any more in the same way.
"How to do a balance sheet."
"Fixed assets, and my loan, which depreciates."
SHE LAUGHS
"Bills for one month."
Oh! The agony of it all.
Feminism to me is incredibly simple.
It's a humanitarian approach to the world, frankly.
"To find another 10,000." I love this.
Yes. "Jason's advice - get more money."
My belief is
that Virago was one of the most significant publishing
and cultural events since the Second World War.
People do thank me a lot.
They say, "Thank you so much for Virago," you know.
And of course, they really are thanking the writers,
who were there all the time. That's the point.
..Though there WAS the odd bit of fighting.
They took on the task of - women's writing!
(A notion THEN some set great store on
(was that women's writing was an oxymoron.)
But though doubters pointed and quipped and jeered,
they rolled up their sleeves and persevered.