In the end ‘testament of experience’ was the compromise description offered by Sontag. Both Angela and Grace indicated they felt that was patronizing. As, frankly, I thought it was. The canon was then—as now—under scrutiny from feminists and Sontag’s stance felt uncomfortable and unbending. Virago’s entire raison d’être was founded on the belief that this old-style exclusion from and protection of what was deemed ‘literature’ needed re-examining and challenging. Who gets to tell the stories? What voices are admitted? Who decides what is great? The compromise—or put-down—of ‘testament of experience’ upheld the notion that there was only one standard by which to be measured.
We in the audience were fired up by the conversation and of course in awe of the three astonishing women. But what I also remember with great pleasure was that afterwards Grace came off the stage, hugged me, and referred to me as ‘like a daughter’. Nodded Angela: ‘Lennie is daughter to us all.’ Happy me.
Angela—as with so many writers—had to supplement her income with teaching creative writing, and after one session with the Arvon Foundation she wrote to Carmen saying that she’d found a writer we would like. It was Pat Barker. Pat had been writing for years but without success: ‘I set out in a very tepid, tentative sort of way writing short, middle-class novels which weren’t published.’ Angela encouraged her to tell a story in her own voice, to tell an authentic story. The result was the absolutely searing Union Street, a story of working-class lives, brilliantly written, one that should have satisfied Susan Sontag. Angela not only worked with Carmen on the editing, she was also extremely helpful to me in talking about publicity for Pat. We had long, long phone calls where she suggested writers we could send the book to, reviewers we could buttonhole, and events Pat might do. At Virago, Carmen decided to present this novel as an important new female working-class story. The male working-class voice had been praised, with the likes of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse in the late 1950s, but it was our contention that the women’s perspective had been overlooked. Here was an honest, true, woman’s voice taking up the stories of silent women from the margins—in a provocative and impressively written novel.
One of the people we sent the manuscript to was Jennie Lee, fierce Scottish Labour MP and one of the founders of the Open University. She was also a miner’s daughter and the widow of Aneurin Bevan, architect of the welfare state. She, we thought, would be a perfect champion of the book. We sent it, and I rang her to see if she had read it and would like to give us a quote for the cover. No! She was appalled and very sharp with me: this is not my working class! We’d had books in my home. It was not like that. This is not my working class. It was an early indication of what we might be up against with our publication.
Union Street is a tough novel about unforgiving, hardscrabble lives in the shadow of the Tyneside mines—each chapter is the story of a woman from a house along Union Street: they are orphans, women on the game, miners’ widows, mothers. The saving grace for the women is their community and, for some, literacy. Pat knew these lives and she also knew these women were not well represented.
By far, reviewers and readers responded well to what was for many a new literary landscape. We did get strong reactions—some found it just too graphic and bleak—and others didn’t give it its literary due. Pat says: ‘Regional, working-class voices are very, very marginalized, and there’s a tendency either not to review the work or to review it in slightly different terms . . . whether its authentic sociology, rather than looking at your themes or the way you’ve treated your characters’.
Susan Sontag, neatly depositing this sort of subject and writing in the ‘testament of experience’ pigeon-hole, would be chastened by Pat’s description of writing her later novels, comparing them to a particular sort of middle-class novel: ‘All those bloody dons sitting around talking about the theme of the book. Frankly, I think it’s a doddle compared to writing about semiliterate or illiterate people . . . It’s money for old rope compared with what you have to do when the character can’t possibly do that.’
Union Street won the Fawcett Society Book Prize in 1983 and was a runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize but Pat’s success created another problem: ‘I felt I had got myself into a box where I was strongly typecast as a northern, regional, working-class, feminist—label, label, label—novelist. It’s not a matter so much of objecting to the labels, but you do get to a point where people are reading the labels instead of the book.’ And after writing three more remarkable, plain-speaking, bold novels, she left Virago to write books about war from men’s points of view. And though she continues to champion the voice of the marginalized her review profile changed, especially after she won the Booker Prize for The Ghost Road. We can thank Pat for being one of the writers who pushed at the boundaries and opened up new territories for literature. Union Street is now a Virago Modern Classic.
Angela Carter was alive to who won the prizes and who got the big reviews. I never felt she resented Pat’s success but she did take a wry view of ‘the boys’ for whom she was a great advocate and who then found greater success than her. I remember phone conversations about Salman and Ian and Ish (Rushdie, McEwan, and Kazuo Ishiguro). She was a writer who took a great interest in other authors, reading widely and supporting them generously. It was an outrage to many of us—publishers, readers, reviewers—that her work was not properly or fully recognized in her lifetime. Gore Vidal said drily that death is a good career move—and, tragically, in Angela’s case it was true. Only after her death did the world catch up with her particular outrageous, imaginative genius.
When Angela was dying, she continued a project that she had started for Virago: editing fairy tales that she had collected from around the world. As a child she had been enthralled by Andrew Lang’s compilations of tales, twelve books in various colours—a fact I delighted in as I too had loved them growing up—and she wanted to make a series like his. She had already translated Perrault’s Fairy Tales but these new collections were about women. We published The First Virago Book of Fairy Tales with a blue jacket and the second was to be in red. Of course we said to her that she must not tax herself, fully expecting her to abandon the project but no, she told others that ‘I am just finishing this for the girls.’ Though we asked another writer, Shahrukh Husain, to finish the endnotes, Angela did complete the book. The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales was published posthumously, in a deep claret-red jacket, with an introduction by the critic and novelist Marina Warner, a slightly modified version of the special obituary she’d written for the Independent. Marina wrote, ‘She gave of herself—her ideas, her wit, her no-bullshit mind –with open but never sentimental prodigality . . . She had the true writer’s gift of remaking the world for her readers.’ Both books were illustrated with woodcuts by Corinna Sargood, one of Angela’s oldest friends, who also created brightly coloured illustrations for the jackets. I later put the two volumes in one and renamed it Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales, and it remains one of Virago’s bestsellers. How I wish Angela could enjoy the fact that we have now sold 100,000 copies of her book.
Before her death I wrote to Angela, and Edmund Gordon asked me if he could include it in his highly perceptive biography of Angela. Reading it over twenty years after I wrote it was a strange but good experience. I still feel a deep sense of loss.
11th February 1992
I want to write & say thank you to you—for many things. For giving me such delight as a reader; for all the support & encouragement you’ve given me & Virago; for the wonderful books you’ve published with us. I was talking to a friend this weekend & I mentioned your name & she said she didn’t go in much for hero worship but you were her heroine—& I guess that’s another way of saying what I feel too. Except that heroes are usually distant & cool, until you get close to them & then they have lead feet (or whatever that expression is!) and that’s not you. You’ve been such fun; & such a tonic and suc
h an interesting, good, generous human being. I feel very privileged to have had the chance to work with such a rich, rewarding writer—who also understands about being a mother . . . I send you & Mark & Alex love. From all accounts the three of you are dealing with this horribly sad & difficult time with great spirit and dignity & that is a tribute to you & Mark. You are a wonderful woman, Angela.
Angela Carter was important to so many Virago writers, including the generation that followed her, particularly Ali Smith and Sarah Waters, who responded to the virtuosity of Angela’s fiction writing. There is something thrilling and freeing about Angela’s wildness, that told these writers that fiction can do anything, go anywhere.
Sarah Waters has talked—so interestingly—about one novel being a conversation with another novel, in the sense that all writers and novels exist because of the writers who precede them. Sarah is conscious of her forebears—Angela Carter being one—but also Jeanette Winterson. There have been novels about gay men, but Sarah has broken new ground in telling lesbian stories for the mainstream. She hasn’t done it single-handedly and her rise in stature has coincided with societal changes at a time when novels, as she recalls in a new afterword to Tipping the Velvet, twenty years after publication, ‘seemed to show grand narratives being prised open and made to reveal—or forced to accommodate—feminist stories, queer stories, lost stories, radical stories’. But it is undoubtedly true that what she has done in her outstanding, absorbing novels is make lesbian lives an ordinary part of fiction—and thus an ordinary part of the written and the real world. She’s brought in voices from the margins, hidden histories out of the dark, and helped make a new British literary tradition. Her subject matter has been provocative, mysterious, and bold, but what really sets her apart from the many is her extraordinary storytelling.
Sarah, intensely modest and private, shows me what superb writing can do for readers. She excites passionate followers who feel that she and her books are part of their lives. As the first port of call for the many who contact Sarah via Virago, I see that she gives people—particularly gay and lesbian readers—great enjoyment but also courage. Sarah says that her own coming out would have been different if she’d had novels such as hers and if gay authors then had the prominence they have now. People write movingly about what her books mean to them.
Fans send pictures of their tattoos—lines from her novels—or ask her to sign copies for their lovers and their wives.
Overwhelmingly, most correspondents just want to say thank you for the novels. As many authors do, Sarah writes back to everyone, and it is so rewarding for me to be the go-between for reader and author. I see over and over again how books touch and change people’s lives.
I go back to Grace Paley: ‘There’s an idea that there’s this great mainstream, which may be wide but is kind of shallow and slow-moving. It’s the tributaries that seem to have the energy.’
When novels come from the margins, beyond the boundaries, they are often met in publishing with a perception that such stories will only be read by the people represented in the books. Certainly that was the talk in certain quarters regarding novelists of colour until writers like Toni Morrison and Zadie Smith blasted that theory and showed how good stories cross any boundaries. The impetus for writing these novels often comes from writers feeling frustrated by the dearth of stories reflecting their lives: Toni Morrison famously said she couldn’t find what she wanted to read so she wrote her own novel, and Sarah Waters has said because lesbian history had been so little known she decided to make her own.
Writing from the margins, knocking barriers out of the way is one thing; finding a publisher who believes in the writing and is determined to find an audience for it is another.
All books are positioned in the market by their title, their jacket, their category; they need to indicate the sort of reader they are appealing to and, not surprisingly, publishers often make them echo a book that has done well in the same area—see all the Dan Brown and The Handmaid’s Tale lookalikes.
And yet, and yet, successful books constantly come out of the blue, and find a new readership.
Maggie Nelson, who with The Argonauts wrote an utterly uncategorizable, outrageous book that could not be pigeon-holed and ‘positioned’, said: ‘I have always believed in a way, you invent your own readers—and that people can read more complicated books than they are credited for.’
As publishers we do know that people hunger for ‘the next thing’, but still we are more likely to be drawn to wanting to repeat a recent successful formula. I understand this and do it myself. But I have a very strong suspicion that we, the gatekeepers of culture—the editors, the publishers, and the booksellers—do not accord enough respect to readers. We underestimate the market. Toni Morrison was an editor at Knopf in America before she became a writer and she railed against this thinking: ‘Acceptance of the “given-ness” of the marketplace keeps us in ignorance.’
Readers have always demonstrated their desire to stretch themselves and to try something new. This, to my mind, is particularly important for us at Virago, as we already have the confidence of our audience. Our success proves that readers can be taken further.
I laugh that publishers now say confidently of unusual, bold books they are launching, ‘for readers who like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts’.
But it gives me hope; there is life beyond boundaries.
Chapter Ten
Up, Down, and Up Again
Independence is damn hard. Of course we always knew it was going to be, but our independence, at first glorious and a relief, became extremely tough. After six years we had a financial crisis leading to horrible redundancies, a vacating of our premises, and, finally, two years later, a boardroom battle that nearly killed us—and Virago too.
But first, festivities: in 1993 we marked our twentieth birthday in some style with a large party at the Barbican in London and with readings, window displays, and events around Britain. We also put on a fabulous show called Her Infinite Variety, drawn from Virago titles and written by Ursula Owen, Sally Alexander, and Jean McCrindle, which launched at Conway Hall on 20 June and toured the country. The readers included Juliet Stevenson, Sheila Hancock, Fiona Shaw, Harriet Walter, Abigail Thaw, Meera Syal, and Francesca Annis; it was spectacular.
Any celebration of Virago and our authors seems to invite articles that ask if we are necessary and bring out dreadful puns: ‘Taming of the Shrewd behind a Write-on Success’ in the Scotsman demonstrates my point. ‘A Woman’s Place is on the Shelf’ in the Daily Telegraph does too. But the birthday articles—all written by women—tell a tale of where feminism was about to go.
Catherine Lockerbie, then literary editor of the Scotsman, betrays suspicion of success: ‘Promotional paraphernalia from balloons to bookmarks . . . so much conspicuous consumerism; whatever happened, sisters, to the idealism of Virago’s origins?’ Even she, a real Virago fan, notes that the list ranged ‘from classics to the newest of poets, from travel to crime to car maintenance. This is feminism as your flexible friend . . . the words “inspirational” and “financially viable” set side by side in the birthday blurb’.
The Guardian’s Catherine Bennett sees something more sinister or dismissive about feminism in general. Is feminism still necessary, she seems to ask, observing that, ‘Today women reign over Random House . . . women editors thrive . . . frightening men with their formidable group, Women in Publishing (WIP).’
In the Daily Telegraph, E. Jane Dickson, under the subtitle ‘Do we Still Need A Feminist Publishing House?’ agrees, writing ‘Virago has become a victim of its own success . . . female frontrunners in the bestselling and the literary stakes are no longer a novelty but the norm, rendering the positive discrimination of a women-only press at best obsolescent and arguably retrograde.’
Only in the Independent Natasha Walter, almost anticipating her own Virago book Living Dolls, wrote what I think was the truth of the time: ‘Vir
ago is the feminist movement in microcosm, in that its achievements have been enormous and not big enough.’
To us at Virago it was clear that at the same time as the world moved on—somewhat—the conversations about women’s writing and about feminism were undoubtedly undergoing revision, and that our job was far from over. Driving over to the Barbican in the days before the big party to check out the room, we were faced with a billboard for a DIY company: a towering wall of locks, chains, and bolts was topped with the words ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’. What? I wrote an article for the Independent they titled ‘Call me old-fashioned, but that advertisement’s sexist: Lennie Goodings defends her right to be offended by images that insult women’. I used the words ‘old-fashioned feminism’; I could already sense the chill of post-feminism in the air when it was beginning to feel that talking about the rights of women was unfashionable and anachronistic, where ‘politically correct’ was the ultimate put-down. Even our own birthday celebrations risked masking an insidious complacency about women’s position.
But we had a grand party!
It was the last celebration for a fair few years. I couldn’t have predicted that we would fall but rise again to celebrate our thirtieth birthday, again in style and again with all the Viragos, but in much altered circumstances.
So what happened?
At the end of 1990, three years after our buy-out, Ursula Owen left to work with the Shadow Arts Minister Mark Fisher on the development of the Labour Party’s arts and media policy (though she remained on the Virago board), and Alexandra Pringle was lured to Hamish Hamilton to become their Editorial Director. Harriet became sole Managing Director and made me Publishing Director in 1991, overseeing five editors. Susan Sandon’s role expanded to Publicity and Marketing Director. We were cutting our titles back a bit, from 110 to 87, and had increased our turnover to £2.5 million. Outlook good.
A Bite of the Apple Page 15