Dorothy Whipple devotees were rewarded for their loyalty many years later when Nicola Beauman, who wrote A Very Great Profession: The Women’s Novel 1914–39 for us, established Persephone, her own reprint publishing house, and proudly reissued Dorothy Whipple’s novels.
Persephone was founded in 1998, but there were others who watched the success of Virago Modern Classics when they began and started similar lists, including the Women’s Press, whose small reprint list included some excellent novels by Kate Chopin, and the Gay Men’s Press, which had a nice line in classics. When Carmen became head of Chatto & Windus in 1982 she reinvented the Hogarth Press to do the same literary recovery work, for out of print novels by men as well as women, and latterly New York Review of Books has a very impressive list but, in my view, the political and cultural success of the Virago Modern Classics has not been replicated. Harriet would often say of Virago in general that ‘we are more than the sum of our parts’, and that is patently true of this list.
It was gratifying to see authors enjoy a second fame. Barbara Comyns, who Carmen discovered through Graham Greene’s recommendation, turned out to be as wonderfully eccentric and quirky as her books; she reminded us of her heroine in The Vet’s Daughter, who would levitate on Clapham Common. A tiny woman with a neat grey head, she was delighted but slightly bemused by all the attention.
Another author who was ironically amused by it all was the redoubtable Storm Jameson, author of Company Parade and Women Against Men, which became Classics in 1982. In 1984 we published her autobiography, Journey from the North, and I went to see her in Cambridge. She was ninety-three, and said she ate nothing but a few eggs a day and that she was surprised to be alive. However, she was studying physics, a subject new to her, to pass the time.
When in the 1980s we reissued Dame Rebecca West’s absorbing, acerbic, truth-telling novels she was ensconced in a magnificent flat overlooking Hyde Park. Here was a writer who was first published in 1916, admired by George Bernard Shaw and a lover of H. G. Wells. Her sharp observations of the sexes remained with her in old age; she said in a television interview that Mrs Thatcher had been badly served by the male members of her party: ‘Men would rather be ruined by one of their own sex than saved by a woman.’
Her sprawling Edwardian novel, The Fountain Overflows, about an impoverished genteel family, thought to be modelled on her own, is a favourite of mine, and Sarah Waters’s too. At an event at the Edinburgh Book Festival, Sarah talked with me about Rebecca West and later she published the talk in Harper’s Bazaar. Sarah’s description of the author she admires is exactly what I think of Sarah’s own work: ‘She also had a genius with language—with image, metaphor and simile. She does what the very best writers do: she makes us see the world in a way that feels absolutely right, yet absolutely new.’
When in 1981 Rebecca West was chosen by the Book Marketing Council as one of the Best of British Authors, I wrote to her with the good news that her novels were going to be in major retailers right across the country. She was not especially impressed; she wrote back saying ‘What IS WH Smith’s?’
One who really did enjoy the limelight was the wickedly splendid Irish writer Molly Keane. She had already been much lauded for Good Behaviour, the novel she’d written in 1981 which begins with the death of an old, cranky mother, killed by her daughter with a rabbit mousse. That book was followed by Time After Time and Loving and Giving: all three published by Diana Athill at André Deutsch. However, she had a great tranche of novels published many years before, under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell, and the Virago Modern Classics went after those. Self-deprecatingly, Molly told us that she’d written these early novels for dress money and under a false name because no one in her hunting and shooting crowd would consort with a ‘girl who wrote books’. When we asked Molly for a photo from the time of her writing as M. J. Farrell she gave us a very smart studio photo but bewailed her hair, saying she had always despaired of its thinness. She seemed to feel that girlhood pain all over again, but then she laughed. Always beautifully and carefully dressed, her slightly fey charm hid a deeply intelligent, spiky talent; we adored her, but I can see from her novels that she was not at ease. And nor did she find writing easy; it was ‘The grims, absolutely the grims,’ she told her fellow Irish writer Polly Devlin in an interview that formed the preface for the reissue of her 1932 novel Conversation Piece.
Many years after she died we published Molly Keane: A Life by her daughter Sally Phipps. She described her mother as having ‘stiletto sharpness and infinite kindness’, and remembered when she was first published in the Virago Modern Classics. Carmen (whom Molly called ‘a tiny bombshell’) and I went to Dublin for the launch of the Irish Classics list and we held a fabulous party in the famous Shelbourne Hotel with all the great and good. The morning after I went to Molly’s room to wish her goodbye and she was tucked up in linen sheets with breakfast on a tray, a small woman smiling in a vast white bed. I observed how properly luxurious she looked—‘Oh no,’ she said, waving her hand across it all, ‘comfort is for the old. Luxury is for the young! Off you go!’ An immensely engaged woman, she sent me a note in December 1988, along with a copy of Loving and Giving, when I was in the latter months of my pregnancy with my first child, Amy. ‘Thinking about you a lot—& full of Old Wives Progress—ask Alexandra to let me know at once which IT is, and how you are, & all about the Labour Pains—duration of, and all Lurid Detail. Now I am so immensely old & after many bloody disagreements with my daughters—I wouldn’t be without them for anything, life wouldn’t be a thing if they weren’t in it.’
Molly lived in Ardmore, in a small, highly decorated, comfortable house overlooking the estuary, and I went there when she was alive and then again with both her daughters when we published Sally’s biography. As we stood looking out of the windows I was told that William Trevor, the great short story writer, had lived just across the water; I had a flash of thinking what extraordinary writers Ireland produces and how marvellous that these two had been neighbours. But no, apparently William Trevor did not like Molly’s writing, and Molly felt the same about his novels, though thought his short stories were all right.
Molly’s letter to me finishes with a little sadness about her writing: ‘Actually I haven’t picked up any prizes—so Unfair—However this last book seems to be doing very well.’ (Salman Rushdie had won the Booker in 1981, the year Molly had been shortlisted for Good Behaviour.)
What we referred to as the Virago Irish Classics list included novels by Molly, Maura Laverty, and Kate O’Brien, as well as Elizabeth Bowen’s non-fiction, and later works by Julia O’Faolain and Polly Devlin. There were also Scottish Classics: Catherine Carswell, Susan Ferrier, Naomi Mitchison, and much later Muriel Spark.
Unsurprisingly, Carmen developed the Australian Classics: Miles Franklin, Angela Thirkell, Henry Handel Richardson, Christina Stead, and later Shirley Hazzard; a couple of Canadians joined the list: Atwood in the early days and Margaret Laurence. One of the greatest sorrows for me was that we invited Margaret Laurence, author of The Stone Angel and the inspiring The Diviners to London and she said yes. I was going to meet another one of my heroes; but then, sadly, she wrote to say she was too ill to travel and she died soon after.
There were Victorian Classics: Mary Cholmondeley, Charlotte M. Yonge, Mary E. Braddon, Mrs Oliphant, Mrs Humphrey Ward, Rhoda Broughton, and George Eliot’s ghost story The Lifted Veil. There were Modernists: Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, and H.D.
The Americans. It seems astonishing now, but some of America’s most important women writers were almost completely unknown in Britain in the 1980s, and this section of the Virago list has some truly great and acclaimed writers: Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Eudora Welty, Grace Paley, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zora Neale Hurston were published in the 1980s and 90s and became yet again highly regarded and studied. Many Americans have been added since, including Nora Ephron, Mary McCarthy, Helene Hanff, Patricia Highsmith, and Elaine Dundy.
Elaine Dundy,
author of The Dud Avocado, later wrote an autobiography, Life Itself!, which we published with a photograph of her doing a beautiful swan dive, epitomizing her avidity for life. She came to London to work on the book with me (I was by then Publisher and her editor) and we sat in a hotel she loved on Jermyn Street to edit the memoir. It is quite a story—from Park Avenue in New York to Paris to London in the 1950s, though ending, oddly, with a passion for Elvis Presley. In London she had met and fallen in love with Kenneth Tynan, the enfant terrible of theatre reviewers. She sent a telegram to her parents: ‘Have married an Englishman. Letter to follow.’ By the time we were editing this part of her story, in the main lobby of the hotel, Elaine was a bit deaf and so her explanation of why she had to leave Kenneth was shouted out to me and the other guests: ‘He liked spanking and I tried but I just couldn’t do it.’ The Dud Avocado, which I love, has the same surprising frankness and insouciance. That marriage failed, not just because of the S&M but because Kenneth Tynan wanted to be the only creative person in the relationship.
Eudora Welty also managed to come to London to meet us and some of her admirers; Alexandra arranged a lunch at Mon Plaisir in Covent Garden that included Hermione Lee and Salman Rushdie, who gave us a quote—‘impossible to overpraise’—for her new novel, Losing Battles, which we first published on the frontlist.
Edith Wharton, who was in her time more famous than her contemporary Henry James, wrote acute observations of society, and Willa Cather rivals William Faulkner for her descriptions of solitude and landscape. At last these writers, deservedly, were seen in the UK as major writers.
However for many years, other than the Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston, whose fabulously stirring and romantic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God remains a bestseller, we did not have many Classics by women of colour. We have published the wonderful writer Bessie Head, and from America Dorothy West and Paule Marshall, and Attia Hossain from Pakistan (aunt of the award-winning Kamila Shamsie) among others. Donna Coonan is very alive to this and has recently published Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and has re-introduced Ann Petry’s The Street, a novel Virago published to muted success in 1986. The publishing and reading world is at last changing.
Lesbian novelists—Radclyffe Hall, Mary Renault, Sylvia Townsend Warner—or novels about lesbians have been key to the list. Our edition of The Well of Loneliness, with its glorious cover of two lovers by Gluck, would have introduced many lesbians to Radclyffe Hall’s important novel, banned in the UK in 1928 when Jonathan Cape first published it.
The English novel of the 1940s to the early 1960s has proved to be the most successful part of the list, led by Elizabeth Taylor, E. M. Delafield, Daphne du Maurier, and Barbara Pym, followed by Nina Bawden, Nell Dunn, Stella Gibbons, Winifred Holtby, Elizabeth Jenkins, Rose Macaulay, Shena Mackay, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Mary Webb—among so many others. Lynn Knight, who became Editorial Director of the Classics in 1988, remembers the pleasure of helping to shape the series: ‘people forget how many of the writers we take for granted today were unavailable then’.
At the heart of the Classics is a commitment to a female literary tradition. Then, as now, the female imagination was much argued over.
We had particular trouble with one famous critic over this issue: the novelist Anthony Burgess, then the dominating chief fiction reviewer of the Observer. He seemed to have made it his business to decide which female novelists could be said to have risen out of their ‘ghetto’. But his 1979 review of Virago’s publication of Dorothy Richardson’s four-volume Pilgrimage has gone down in history—both Virago’s and his.
He wrote: ‘Lovers of literature of either sex, unconcerned with sexism, must be grateful for [Virago’s] recovery of a great fictional masterpiece. Or, God help us, mistresspiece . . . By no stretch of usage can Virago be made not to signify a shrew, a scold, an ill-tempered woman, unless we go back to the etymology—a man-like maiden (cognate with virile)—and the antique meaning—amazon, female warrior . . . It is an unlovely and aggressive name, even for a militant feminist organization, and it presides awkwardly over the reissue of a great roman fleuve which is too important to be associated with chauvinist sows.’
The fact that his editors did not challenge and cut his outrageous slur tells us of his power but also of the time. Burgess was reflecting what some thought—Virago was a separatist company that appropriated to its cause works and authors which were not feminist. Of course, this entirely misses the point of the Virago Modern Classics, which Carmen repeatedly said was to ‘demonstrate a female literary tradition’. Dorothy Richardson, who wrote in a stream of consciousness style before James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, more than justifies her inclusion in the list. But the deep irony here is that only a feminist press would have republished this long out of print work and caught the attention of the likes of Burgess.
Today, Donna Coonan defends the world sometimes denigrated as the women’s realm: ‘I take the view that a small canvas is not necessarily an unambitious one. What is seen under the microscope can reveal much about the world in which we live. And what skill it takes to write observantly, feelingly, with wit and perception, about the everyday . . . Relationships, families, children, love—these are not marginal; on the contrary, they are life itself.’
By the early 1980s the Classics—each carefully numbered—were nearing one hundred titles. It had become a hugely famous part of Virago and that made for some anxiety within the office. I look back now and see that whereas Carmen had originally been Managing Director in charge of finance, publicity, sales, rights, and marketing, alongside some editorial acquisitions, and Ursula had the Editorial Director’s realm, as Carmen became more and more editorially involved the balance of power shifted somewhat. The balance of the list was also unequal and that made some of us uncomfortable. The point of Virago was not only to look back, surely? Our detractors and our competitors were quick to point this out. The Women’s Press’s slogan at one point was ‘Live Authors, Live Issues’. In our catalogue of this time our editorial note works hard to claim prominence for our new titles. I remember feeling dismayed when talking to the press and at events when people expressed surprise that we did anything but reissues. We also had a vibrant, original frontlist!
We complicated the situation by publishing even more reprints: starting in 1981, the Non-fiction Classics list; a Virago Travellers list; as well as keeping the original Virago History Reprint list in print. Later we started Lesbian Landmarks, a list overseen by Alison Hennegan which published novelists Nancy Spain, Han Suyin, Christa Winsloe, Maureen Duffy, Clemence Dane, and Gertrude Stein.
Then because of the success a decision was taken to give all Virago books, not just the reprints, a green spine. Even though we had a different logo for frontlist titles, many booksellers and reviewers understandably saw everything as Classics. It was a frustration but also, of course, a great triumph. In only a few short years Virago green had come to mean something beyond the publishing industry: it had reader recognition and loyalty.
Over the last few years Donna has emerged as one of the most inventive Classics editors. She has added 200 new novels, including the writers Patricia Highsmith, P. L. Travers, Barbara Pym, Mary McCarthy, Muriel Spark, and Janet Frame, and introduced the beautiful Virago Classics hardbacks and a new list of children’s classics by Nina Bawden, E. Nesbit, Noel Streatfeild, Rumer Godden, and Joan Aiken among others. Her curation of the Virago Modern Classics’ fortieth-anniversary editions won plaudits and prizes. Rebecca, in its proper place as a Classic since 2003, alongside all of Daphne du Maurier’s titles, celebrated its eightieth anniversary in 2018 and the special edition reissue hit the bestseller list. I think Donna has splendidly honoured the tradition of the Virago Modern Classics.
By 2020 the Classics list will have published more than 700 titles. I have listed so many of them here because only by naming—and publishing—them will these authors avoid the fate of once again being forgotten.
Chapter
Five
‘Fuck the Patriarchy!’
Non-fiction
I am on a platform at the Bradford Literature Festival with the extraordinarily brave and powerful Egyptian-American activist Mona Eltahawy, author of Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution. The topic—which, not uninterestingly, we are sharing with two men—is How to Be a Feminist. It’s 2017.
A young woman in a hijab lifts her hand and asks a question about her struggle to get a commitment to equal opportunities in her office. Free of any head covering (very intentionally, we have already learned), red-haired Mona waves her heavily braceleted arm in the air and to a loud laugh and huge cheer from the audience—and me too—shouts ‘Fuck the patriarchy!’
The mic then comes my way. I, feeling conspicuously less than rousingly radical but, you know, I recognize office life, say: ‘You can make a difference, but you must choose your battles.’ Thinking back to Adrienne Rich and also to June Eric-Udorie, a new young Virago author—more of whom later—I add, ‘Take care of yourself. Learn what is important to you.’
Somewhere between these two options—fuck the patriarchy or keep plugging away for what you know is right—is how most women find themselves responding to sexism and inequality. We need rage and inspiration, we need realism and practical solutions, and we need to know our histories, literary and otherwise.
Virago’s non-fiction books come from that intersection, where women authors search and explore, report from the front line on how it is, or uncover hidden histories—with as much style, aplomb, and energy as Mona’s exhortation—to produce literary biographies, polemic, history, humour, and memoir.
A Bite of the Apple Page 8