I found this idea that there was a narrative thread running through most people’s lives, and, importantly, one they were conscious of, most helpful in helping a memoirist draw together the strands that made up their own life. The journalist Katharine Whitehorn was struggling with her autobiography, Selective Memory, and so I asked her to think about how she viewed her life; what was the aspect that joined it all up? Together we worked out that she felt that good luck was the keynote of her life: luck had always come her way. And even though this view doesn’t account for her obvious talent, that sense of the wonder and pleasure of always being in the right place at the right time was a great revelation. It gave us the organizing principle of the book and the backbone of the story.
I feel it is the job of the editor to protect the writer, to be their harshest reader, and to speak honestly to them. Once they have that information it is up to them what they do with it.
Lyndall Gordon decided to write a book about the originality and poetic spirit that her mother managed to keep alive in a small-minded, provincial place in South Africa of the 1940s and 50s—a spirit that influenced her daughter to become a most exciting and intuitive biographer. It became obvious to us both that Lyndall, who had previously understood her role in her mother’s life as a willing helper and ‘sister’, was uncovering a painful divide as their lives and dreams diverged. It was a moment of intense collaboration as then bravely, honestly, Lyndall changed tack and pursued this new realization. We’re both very proud of her Divided Lives.
It’s not entirely unusual to find that there is something unwritten, unspoken, something about the story that doesn’t make sense, doesn’t add up. Until we both have found that piece of the puzzle, there is something hollow, something ringing falsely in the book. I would hope to have built up enough trust with the author that they can tell me the thing—usually about a family member or friend—that they don’t want to share with their readers. One debut author was giving an ex-boyfriend quite a bit of space in her memoir. I thought he was standing in for things she didn’t want to talk openly about, but I also felt that because their break-up was still fresh her perspective wasn’t as clear as it would be even a few months later when we published the book and she might be sorry he was given so much air time. She laughed and agreed.
It’s only once we have the truth that together we can work out how to show it.
Sometimes distance and time mean that an author is very ready to distil a difficult relationship, to see beyond its immediacy and portray the complications in a more rounded way. Sally Phipps has a very clear-eyed view of her novelist mother, Molly Keane, and of her mother’s view of her and her sister too. On her deathbed Molly had suggested that Sally write a biography of her: a gift and a burden that Sally had taken to heart. She had been writing her mother’s life for well over ten years when it came to me in its near-to-finished state. Sally was by this time in her late sixties and not a typist, not a computer user, and without email. I decided after one short meeting in London and several phone calls that the only way to finish the edit was to go to her in County Cork in Ireland. She suggested we edit at the extraordinary Ballymaloe House Hotel, and we drove there from the airport. From the boot of the car Sally retrieved a deep wicker basket in which sat her manuscript. ‘Doesn’t everyone carry things like this?’ In we went and sat together for two straight days, reading, often out loud, every line of the more than 100,000-word book alongside my suggested edits and with references to a small notebook in which Sally had made notes on her original manuscript. The staff—who loved Sally and had known Molly—gave us the conservatory to work in, and as we studied the book together a storm blew up around us; first snow covered the grass and the windows and then torrential rain pounded down, creating a tumultuous roiling in the river running past the hotel, which overflowed its banks. The helpful staff brought out many little heaters, which they banked in a circle around us, and on we went into the evening and through the storm, finally stopping for the famous Ballymaloe supper. A quick sleep and we resumed, after which Sally took me back through the now deeply flooded roads to her stone cottage, where I sat in my coat as she made me soup; we warmed ourselves in front of an open peat fire. I love Sally and am a big fan of her mother, but I hadn’t quite expected to experience so literally the temperature of the houses in which Molly had grown up. I went back to my warm London house, with the full manuscript of the splendid Molly Keane ready for the typesetters, though not in a basket!
When, to my great surprise, I won Editor of the Year at the 2010 British Book Awards, Susie Boyt gave me a celebratory supper at her house and surrounded me with a tableful of my authors. It was so marvellous, and embarrassing, but actually a little discombobulating too. When I am editing or publishing a writer it’s intense and as if they are my only author. And now there they all were together!
Susie Boyt’s courageous and wildly original memoir, My Judy Garland Life, taught me how an author can give of herself wholeheartedly and yet also keep her soul intact. Bold and beautiful, it tells of the hero worship of a woman who, for Susie, ‘seemed to miraculously transform the harsher truths of life into something wonderful, where all feelings however dark are good and true because they’re yours’. This the young Susie took as encouragement to ‘bypass all the indignity of the strong feelings I was grappling with’. Brilliant memoir like this is a tricky, fascinating, brave balance of total honesty but not honesty in total—that is, not telling absolutely everything. Susie wisely kept much back.
It’s important to know how to protect and take care of yourself as an author. I watch authors carefully for that tipping point. I learned this in the early 1980s, when we published the iconic American writer Tillie Olsen, author of the fiction Tell Me a Riddle and Yonnondio, and the non-fiction Silences, an original work about women and writing. Tillie came to London. Startlingly, she wanted to read out loud to an audience the entire text of Tell Me a Riddle, which though short was still a test of some hours’ endurance. I arranged it in the upstairs room of a pub in Hampstead, and with our hearts in our mouths we waited—and then watched as the room filled to overflowing with adoring fans. It was a moving evening and a great success, and at the end Tillie gave more and more of herself, listening, talking, crying with her readers. It was the same as we went around other events in London; people asked and she gave and gave. I saw that it was what sustained her but it looked like giving away yourself, dissipating your courage even. Though lucky people who received it . . .
The editor is sometimes regarded as the gatekeeper, the means to publication: the one who can say yes, let’s acquire this book, and then later, after editing, let’s go to print, so it sometimes seems that they have the upper hand in the relationship. But that is not true. An author–editor relationship is a balancing act: the question of where the power lies changes all the time. Though a good relationship is held together with mutual respect and admiration, neither side will forget that the relationship is underpinned by a contract. It’s certainly not all about money, but it is about money. And either side of that contractual relationship can decide that it is no longer working; perhaps the author wants a new publishing house and that will be a good career move for them; perhaps the editor senses the sort of book the author is writing is no longer popular with readers. Either side can sever the ties. And that is usually painful—for both sides.
I publish many of Emma Donoghue’s books, including Slammerkin, which I loved. For various complicated but entirely valid reasons understood and agreed by Emma and me and her agent, when the manuscript of Room was finished it was sent to many editors and I had to compete for it with other publishers. I knew immediately it was an astonishing novel, about a young woman and her child held hostage for years in a small room by a brutal man. But what made this book so touching, brave, and special was that Emma chose to tell it as a love story between a mother and her son. I felt it would be a breakout book for her. I didn’t predict a Booker shortlist and a movie, but I knew it woul
d succeed and I desperately wanted to publish it. I offered a large advance but Picador offered more and I lost it. Emma’s agent rang me on my mobile to tell me the bad news just as I was walking up to my front door. I felt the blow of disappointment so keenly that I actually shed tears. I stood in my front garden sniffing, saying to myself, ‘It’s only a book, it’s only a book, it’s only a book.’ But it didn’t feel like that. When you invest your whole life in the written word it’s never only a book. I felt sadness at the loss of a future relationship with Emma but glad that we thankfully still have her on our backlist.
So editing is about a relationship that is intense and intimate, based on a financial transaction. Another curious balance.
I learned this deep respect for authors from Carmen and from Ursula. Even though their loyalty lay with Virago, both had a tremendous affinity with their authors. Both were willing to take chances on new writers, and I don’t recall a time when contracts got cancelled because the writer failed to deliver their manuscript on time—which does happen in publishing houses. In fact when Angela Carter was struggling to write The Sadeian Woman, Carmen continually encouraged her but was also highly aware that her £1,000 advance meant that Angela couldn’t afford to devote her life to the project. It was published in 1979, many years after the initial contract.
And it was Carmen’s sensitivity to her authors that led her to rage at Chatto when she couldn’t get the same money for an Angela Carter novel as Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, and Fay Weldon were commanding.
Here, of course, is the uncomfortable rub: money and the value of creativity. A publishing house takes a gamble on a writer and a project, paying money up front on the promise of either a proposal or a finished manuscript, that the book will be good, will find a market, and will earn that advance and more. But it is so very far from a pure numbers calculation: everything is in the mix—competition, loyalty, fashion, balance of power—as well as the written word. It’s at this stage of publishing that commerce and the need for profit butt up hard against creativity and the author’s worth. And then ‘the deal’ becomes the focus. Who gets the best out of it? The author or the publisher? Obviously, the perfect deal is one where both parties finish happily, feeling they both got their fair dues. This is where the ideal does meet business squarely, but it is not quite as frequent as one would like.
Once on the other side of the agreement, the editor–author conversations begin. Partly because of the sense of intimacy, partly because the author and editor—along with the agent—now feel like a team up against the world, a relationship begins. It has all the intensity of any deep relationship, plus the fact that the editor is now the advocate of the book—doing battle, as it were, on behalf of the author. It is like falling in love.
I adored the late Irish novelist and poetry evangelist Josephine Hart. What I witnessed in Josephine was the courage to respond to the written word emotionally and honestly. Even though I met her well on in my career, I learned much from her: she reminded me of the danger of cynicism and irony, of protecting yourself from truth and beauty. In her book Catching Life by the Throat: How to Read Poetry and Why she wrote, ‘Poetry has never let me down . . . I was a word child in a country of word children where life was language before it was anything else. Poets were not only heroes, they were indeed the gods of language.’ She had a passionate, elemental relationship with art and her novels show that she was not afraid of big, unruly, raw—ferocious even—feelings. She knew that is what literature is for.
She thrilled to our proposed Virago Modern Classics cover for Damage, which showed a beautiful thorny scarlet rose, and sent me two dozen long-stemmed red roses with a line from the poet Marianne Moore, ‘Your thorns are the best part of you.’
We editors are here to serve the writers, first and foremost—and I firmly believe that—but I also know that there is creativity and even savageness and sharp edges in the act of editing and publishing. A few thorns are a good thing.
Chapter Twelve
Does Any Other Successful Publisher Get Asked Constantly if They are Still Necessary?
In 2017 I stepped back to become Chair and happily made Sarah Savitt, a brilliant woman who I knew was going to bring new ideas, strategies, and fun, Virago Publisher. I said, laughing somewhat ruefully, ‘I promise I am going to allow myself to say this just once, but speaking as someone who slogged through the post-feminist era, it has to be said this is a great time to be Publisher at Virago!’ She had the grace to laugh too.
And we both know it is a great time. At last publishers are reaching out to find and publish books by marginalized voices; publishing houses are taking real steps to try to change their almost all white, middle-class staff; there is proper gender pay gap analysis; conversations around gender norms and definitions are being opened up even further, with transgender and non-binary experiences being explored and celebrated; the necessity of intersectionality is acknowledged. One result is that feminism—in the media and in books—is suddenly saleable.
I am not especially sanguine about regarding feminism as a trend rather than a political movement but I recognize the way fashions influence book-buying, and of course Virago benefits hugely. What does make me anxious about trending is not only that much released in the name of feminism is really very thin bandwagon publishing, but, more importantly, seeing feminism this way implies that it is merely the current fashion—until the next thing comes along.
It looks like the feminism of the current generation—trendy or otherwise—is not going to go away and the strides we are making now will not be negated. I think that’s true and maybe we are really at the tipping point. But didn’t we also think that was true in the 1970s and 80s? And then we hit the 90s and found out that political movements can retreat and reform as well as advance.
Virago had ridden the crest of the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s and enjoyed fame as one of the leading feminist publishers of the 1980s. The changes in feminism towards the end of the 1980s and in the early 90s showed increasing diversity or, if one looked at it another way, fragmentation.
In the 1980s feminist concerns were wide-ranging: Andrea Dworkin’s important argument about pornography; Gloria Steinem’s Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions; Judith Butler’s discussion of socially constructed gender and essentialism; lesbian poetry and politics; a close study of sexism and language; and particularly from women of colour, the insistence of intersectionality, as defined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989.
As usual at Virago, we were doing many things in the 1980s: reclaiming female literary history with the Virago Modern Classics; launching new fiction writers; recording the lives of women—famous, infamous, and unknown; and reflecting some of the feminist concerns of the time. It was the decade in which we kept the faith with American feminists Kate Millett and Adrienne Rich, and British feminists Lynne Segal and Beatrix Campbell.
When I look at our catalogue for just six months of 1987 I am amazed by our ambition: we launched the Virago Upstarts; published The Handmaid’s Tale and a women’s travel guide; re-launched the famous Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller with a revised version of The Drama of Being a Child; continued our Virago Pioneers; and published more Virago poetry, more Virago Travellers, and Virago Non-fiction Classics—and twenty-four Virago Modern Classic novels. We had seventeen members of staff, but all the same . . .
And we completed our management buy-out in July of that year.
We also began exploring and reimagining the crime genre with writers such as Amanda Cross (pseudonym of the feminist writer Carolyn Heilbrun). The Women’s Press was making a real success of feminist science fiction. Feminist novelists were pushing the boundaries.
Meanwhile, feminist polemic continued to roar from the United States. Britain has often looked to America to the feminist writers who write in commandingly confident prose: proffering new theses in popular ways and unabashedly wearing the line that first was emblazoned on Marilyn French’s novel The Women’s Room: �
��This book will change your life.’
In 1990, in my new job as Publisher, an extraordinary manuscript landed on my desk—it was by a young American woman who I remembered had been an intern at Virago a few years before. Over the years we had many extremely good interns, and at one point we’d had an arrangement with Oxford University to offer some of their Rhodes scholars a few months with Virago. One clever young student stood out: she was quick and so very helpful in editorial, and especially good at blurb-writing. She had a broad smile and tremendously willing nature, and whenever there was a pause in the work she wanted to talk about feminism and beauty. She was determined, blessed with confidence and good looks; she was talented and there was no doubt she would go far.
That manuscript was The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women and the debut author was Naomi Wolf. I bid for it immediately—only to be outbid by one Carmen Callil at Chatto! Of course Carmen herself would see the importance of a book like this, but what it showed was that her company also saw it: feminism was bankable. Over at Hamish Hamilton, Alexandra Pringle published Marilyn French’s The War Against Women and Katie Roiphe’s controversial The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism, and in 1993 Carmen published Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women by Susan Faludi. Feminist books, particularly the big, bold American ones, equalled good money for publishers. (Though as a result Virago, with smaller resources, was often unable to compete for the books.)
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