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CHAPTER 1
'Books with Bite': Virago Press and the Politics of Feminist Conversion
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 – that is close to it. 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.
Anthony Burgess in a review of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, reissued by Virago in 1989 (quoted in Scanlon and Swindells, 1994: 42)
Twenty years since Marilyn French's The Women's Room, one of the most influential novels of that time, women's lives have changed. There is a new spirit in women's writing which Virago salutes with its new 'V' imprint. The launch titles are as diverse as women themselves, but the young authors share a liberating sense of irreverence and risk-taking. The 'V' aim is to avoid political correctness at all costs: these are books by women which speak to men as much as women.
'Wayward Girls & Wicked Women', Virago relaunch promotion (Guardian, 1997)
There is some considerable distance between being lambasted by a characteristically curmudgeonly Anthony Burgess for militant political chauvinism, and squeamish recoil from ideological commitment under the guise of avoiding 'political correctness'. That both of these quotations refer to the public face of Britain's Virago Press during the course of a single decade highlights the extent to which the women's publishing house has reinvented itself for a new generation of readers. Such a marked volte-face must derive either from a suspiciously late twentieth-century obsession with self-reinvention and novelty for its own sake or, more fundamentally, from a crisis of house identity suffered by Virago and its directors. Such a seizure of self-doubt can be pinpointed with unusual accuracy: the linchpin between the two faces of Virago outlined above is the sale of the press in November 1995 to Little, Brown & Co. UK, a subsidiary of the US-based multinational Time Warner. The sale, and the flurry of negative publicity that surrounded it, represented a critical phase not only for Virago, but for feminist publishing as a whole, as falling profits and uninspiring frontlists forced reconsideration of feminist publishing's agenda – a thorough-going industry soul-searching of the kind that Virago had not undertaken publicly in the course of its 23-year history. For this reason, the 1995 sale of Virago serves as a critical vantage point from which to survey the press's history and against which the company's post-1996 relaunch can be measured. Beneath the breathless rush of the new Virago's promotional copy, it is possible to discern a frantic search for the winning formula by which Virago formerly united its profits with its politics – and the belief that this elusive link is capable of being reconstituted in the consumer-dominated, politically skittish 1990s and beyond.
The sale of Virago Press to publisher Philippa Harrison's Little, Brown UK group for a rumoured £1.3 million on 2 November 1995 bears closer analysis because of the wider debates around feminist publishing which the incident sparked in the international media (Rawsthorn, 1995: 7; Bookseller, 1995b: 8). Essentially three strands are discernible in the journalistic coverage of the sale: the personality-dominated 'feuding feminists' angle (Evening Standard, 1995: 8; Shakespeare, 1995: 12; Porter, 1995: 1, 25; Rawsthorn, 1995: 7); the accusation of mismanagement and poor business practice (Pitman, 1995; Alberge, 1995: 3); and – most common among left-identified newspapers – the lament for a passing golden age of feminist and publishing history represented by Virago (Dalley, 1995: 21; Baxter, 1995: 9). The first of these approaches, that focusing on the personal animosity between Virago's founder, Carmen Callil, the firm's original director and former chairman [sic], and Ursula Owen, initially Virago's editorial director and later its joint managing director, follows the convenient journalistic practice of reducing complex issues to personal antagonisms. Epitomising this hostile coverage is Henry Porter's exposé of 'feminist publishers – their angry struggle' in his feature article for the Daily Telegraph, entitled 'The Feminist Fallout that Split Virago' (1995). Strategically juxtaposing photographs of Callil and Owen, Porter paints a scenario of maenadic fury, the obvious subtext of which urges that sisterhood is at best merely spectral – suitable for a rallying cry but a risible failure when put to the test. In pursuing the feminist catfight line, the article ploughs an increasingly overworked media furrow. The early 1990s war-by-fax waged between tireless self-promoters Camille Paglia and Julie Burchill was belaboured in the mainstream press in precisely the same manner, as were the ideological differences between Australian author Helen Garner and younger feminists in the newspaper flurry over Garner's book about sexual harassment within universities, The First Stone (1995). According to such journalistic practice, the mergers and buy-outs of largely male-run multinational publishing companies are read as auguries of market trends; those of feminist publishing companies betoken nothing more significant than the hysteria of the wandering womb. As an unidentified 'ex-Virago' confided to Jan Dalley in her Independent on Sunday article: 'When men have boardroom battles, it's heroic and Titanic and serious. When women do the same, it's a catfight' (1995: 21).
Of the many articles published about Virago in late 1995, those of most significance for the purposes of this discussion are the pieces appearing in the UK's centre-left broadsheets – the Observer and the Independent on Sunday in particular – for they invoke the issue of Virago's loss of independence to survey the general state of feminist publishing, and to reignite then latent debates about the political viability of such enterprises. During the high point of Virago's commercial success in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the substantial backlist sales generated by its fiction reprint series, the Virago Modern Classics, and its unmatched reader loyalty tended to obviate the need for any such debate. Virago was phenomenally successful, and commercial success was seen to constitute the litmus test of its publishing philosophy. The subsequent nadir of the company's fortunes in late 1995 is attributable to a variety of causes: a profit of barely £100,000 on sales of over £3,000,000 (a margin of under 5 per cent); the resignation of senior directors Carmen Callil, Harriet Spicer and Lennie Goodings within a period of eight months (Evening Standard, 1995: 8; Bookseller, 1995d: 6; Buckingham, 1995: 4); low staff morale; staleness induced by slow middle-level employee turnover; and ferocious competition from the feminist lists of mainstream houses for high-profile female authors and titles (Ezard, 1995: 3).
Yet, more pervasively, Virago's loss of direction is attributable to a crisis of confidence in the political and cultural role of a feminist publishing house, a deep-seated suspicion of its own irrelevance in an age that has broadly appropriated feminist positions as mainstream thinking, but which simultaneously eschews explicit gender politics as embarrassingly passé. Such defeat points, paradoxically, to the old-style Virago's victory: so successful was its publishing philosophy that its radical avant-gardism of the early 1970s appeared to the jaded mid-1990s as banally self-evident. Hence Virago's 1995 directors might have been forgiven for wondering whether they should preside over the company's demise or respond with a Mark Twain-like salvo to the effect that reports of its death had been greatly exaggerated.
Should Virago's sale to the world's largest media conglomerate be taken as evidence that feminism's battle for representation from the margins of political and cultural power has been won, and that its place in the cultural mainstream has been established? Alternatively, is the subsumption of Virago within the capacious corporate structure of Time Warner the final victory of market forces and economic rationalism over political commitment – the selling out of a feminist dream? It is in keeping with the complex ambiguities of feminist publishing that the fact of Virago's sale should be susceptible to both readings, but both represent an oversimplification of the issue. For Virago's 1995 crisis is attributable chiefly to a loss of confidence in what had, until that point, proved a delicate balancing act between the seemingly irreconcilable forces of politics and profit. By refusing to acknowledge that commercial success need necessarily vitiate political integrity, Virago attained a profile among the general reading public higher than that of any feminist press worldwide. The savvy and legerdemain by which such a delicate balance was achieved bears closer scrutiny, not only for the light that it casts on the fate of Virago Press in particular, but because it represents an optimal – though precarious – point on the continuum strung between feminist oppositionality and market centrality.
The characteristic that distinguishes Virago from many other feminist presses which sprang up under the invigorating influence of women's activism from the late 1960s is the duality of its self-conception: it perceived itself simultaneously both as a commercial publishing house and as an intrinsic part of the British women's liberation movement. With the mutation of international leftist politics towards the centre over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, it is difficult now to recapture the anomalousness of such a position in the socio-political climate of the early 1970s. With feminism regarding the progressive left as its natural political home, such a flagrant embrace of capitalist principles on the part of Virago engendered some suspicion, and attracted substantial criticism from the socialist wings of the women's movement (Owen, 1998b). Yet, the insistence that politics and profitability be brought into a working relationship is, in retrospect, a radical proposition. Virago's raison d'être was to publish books informed by the feminist politics of the time and to make them profitable – in foundation member Harriet Spicer's terms 'to make profitable what you wanted to do' (Spicer, 1996).
The attempted unification of capitalist and feminist agendas placed Virago in a borderland position, between the feminist sisterhood (with its preference for experimental, collectively run co-operatives such as the British periodical Spare Rib ) and the traditional power centres of mainstream London publishing (which regarded politically identified publishing – let alone feminist publishing – as a commercial non-starter and as a somewhat distasteful predilection). Nevertheless, Virago's protean house identity proved the key to its success. Because the press maintained a double outsider status in relation to both groups, it was able to weather the enormous changes in industry organisation and feminist thought that occurred during the 1970s and 1980s. Significantly, it was in the early 1990s – as feminism embraced the cultural possibilities of ambivalence and irony – that Virago appeared to harden in its political stance and to suffer recurrent financial losses. In the apt colloquialism of former Virago employee Sarah Baxter, 'Virago lost the plot' (1995: 9). The vagaries of fashion in feminist thought, not to mention the unpredictability of complex consumer economies, reward feminist presses that state their politics up front, but which are canny enough to factor in a buffer zone of ambivalence and allowances for revision. Provisional certainties, not lapidary pronouncements, have the best chance of securing market rewards.
The borderlands between divergent political systems and ideologies can, however, prove fraught and uncomfortable ground: original Virago member Ursula Owen speaks wryly of 'get[ting] flak from the left and right, but I'm fairly resigned to that' (Macaskill, 1990: 434). Alexandra Pringle, who joined as Virago's fourth member in 1978, casts the press's dual outsider status in a more playful light: 'Does it make you feel that you're under siege? Well, yes. But it's quite fun that, you feel you're out there battling ... up there on the barricades' (1996). This concept of strategic self-positioning in order to partake in both feminist activism and commercial publishing – but combined with a refusal to be defined or contained by either – is key to Virago's achievement and its current remarketing. Within this general framework of Virago as a political and publishing fringe-dweller – though a powerful one by reason of its fringe-dwelling status – this discussion analyses the company from its origins in 1972, including its post-sale relaunch in mid-1996 and taking into account subsequent seasons' developments. The first section presents a general overview of the company's history and its changing institutional niches, rebutting the misconception present in much writing about Virago's 1995 sale that Virago had, until that point, been a fully independent company (Ezard, 1995: 3; Henry, 1995: 13; Bookseller, 1995b: 8). Secondly, the discussion explores the facet of Virago's identity that is broadly feminist, focusing on Virago's complex relationship with the women's movement and with the academic wing of feminist politics – university-based women's studies programmes. The discussion then proceeds to site Virago within the context of the publishing industry, focusing on three key issues: the significance of independence for feminist presses; Virago's marketing of feminism for a mainstream readership; and Virago's role in the creation and appropriation of a market for feminist books. Lastly, Virago's current state of play is analysed, as is its most recent attempts to remarket itself as a trade publisher with special appeal to a younger, more politically jaundiced, readership. The structure of this chapter, analysing Virago firstly against the background of feminist politics and, in the second instance, against publishing industry dynamics, is the result of convenience rather than of any absolute theoretical distinction between the two spheres. Publishing and politics are, in the case of Virago, indisputably interlinked; the disentangling of Virago's relationship with first one and then the other area serves merely as an analytical device to cast light upon the unique position that Virago occupied at the cusp of the profit-driven publishing industry and the politically driven women's movement.
A KITCHEN TABLE IN CHELSEA: SELF-MYTHOLOGISATION AND THE ORIGINS OF VIRAGO
The origins and publishing history of Virago Press have been so often recapitulated in the firm's promotional material that the division between past and present has all but dissolved – history is recycled as publicity in a manner that occasionally owes more to directorial agendas than to historical veracity. The self-mythologising strain in Virago is comparable in publishing history only with Allen Lane's famous championing of the early Penguin paperbacks: because both ventures were innovatory for their time, the fact of their existence – aside from any individual title they produced – has become in itself a badge of their founders' achievement. The origins of Virago lie in the oft-repeated detail that the press began at founder Carmen Callil's kitchen table in her home in Chelsea, and that it was fuelled by red wine and late nights spent arguing over the politics of the emerging women's liberation movement, all undertaken against a backdrop of economic buoyancy and political possibility (Lowry, 1977: 9; Macaskill, 1990: 432; Durrant, 1993: 93; Gerrard, 1993: 61). The company's initial self-description – 'the first mass-market publishers for 52% of the population – women. An exciting new imprint for both sexes in a changing world' (Virago publicity pamphlet, 1996: 1) – encapsulates both the optimism and the determinedly nonsectarian vision of the press for which its founders strove. The house's success over the following two decades and its immense brand-name recognition fostered celebrations not so much of the firm's individual achievements, but of the press's very existence: in 1993 A Virago Keepsake to Celebrate Twenty Years of Publishing neatly conflated in its title the individual press with the concept of feminist publishing. The self-celebratory tone of the book, distributed free to bookshops by Virago, earned the press censure from some sections of the women's movement who critiqued the discrepancy between Virago's profits in the 1980s and feminism's political retreat:
In the Virago Keepsake a further shift has taken place; a move from the individual author to the Virago author, a celebration not of the women's movement, or of women's writing, but the survival of the press itself – a recognition of what it stands for, not so much in terms of political achievement, but brand loyalty and quality writing. (Scanlon and Swindells, 1994: 42)
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Excerpted from "Mixed Media"
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Copyright © 2004 Simone Murray.
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