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Virago at 50: a potted history and 10 titles to try

Publisher Sarah Savitt explains its history and authors Sarah Waters and Lucy Scholes pick their favourites

Carmen Callil, founder of Virago, discusses the women's liberation movement, at the Hay Festival last year in Hay-on-Wye, Wales. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images

Fri Sep 8 2023 - 05:01

Virago, the feminist publisher of outstanding books for all readers, turned 50 in June.

Born out of the political and social change of the 1970s, Virago’s mission has always been to champion the voices of women and, more recently, people of underrepresented genders, and bring them to the widest possible readership around the world. The breadth of the list – fiction, history, politics, humour, biography, classic literature and more – has always been an important part of our identity too.

The idea of Virago as a feminist business was also crucial. Carmen Callil, with Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe, started Spare Rib Books in 1972, and by June 1973 the name had changed to Virago and this feminist business – with three women directors – was officially listed as a publishing company. Soon after, Ursula Owen and Harriet Spicer stepped in and Virago was off and running – joined not long after by Alexandra Pringle and Lennie Goodings.

From the start, and to this day, we are often asked: is Virago still necessary?

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Writing by women and people of underrepresented genders is still not given the same critical or prize attention as writing by men. Their writing continues to be read, published and judged differently – often pigeonholed as particular, domestic, individual. And there are still voices that aren’t being given space. Back in the early 1980s, Virago was the only British publisher to take a chance on Maya Angelou’s first memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which became an influential bestseller. And it still happens now that we can be the only publisher to see the potential in what others consider a marginal story.

What will Virago look like in 50 years’ time? The most exciting – and the most truthful – answer is that I don’t know. Carmen Callil set the ball rolling with a revolutionary idea – to celebrate writing by women, who at that time were underrepresented and misrepresented in publishing – and it’s such a strong idea that it can manifest in so many ways. Even since our 40th anniversary, we’ve begun publishing graphic novels, launched a podcast and seen Girl, Interrupted become a TikTok sensation. Who could have predicted those things 10 years ago?

Writers are always ahead of the rest of us, bringing us untold stories, fresh perspectives and original voices. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Sarah Savitt, Publisher, Virago Press

Five Virago titles selected by Sarah Waters

The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

I discovered Hazzard’s marvellous, luminous writing only rather recently; now I don’t know how I ever managed to get along without it. Her novels and short stories are all terrific, but The Great Fire is my favourite: the story of a quiet, grand passion played out in Asia, New Zealand and England in the wake of the Second World War.

The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister edited by Helena Whitbread

The inspiration for TV’s Gentleman Jack – but the real Anne Lister was a more complex character, and her frank descriptions of her romantic and sexual entanglements with other women, along with her determination to live life on her own terms, make for a compulsive, fascinating read.

Vera by Elizabeth von Arnim

This 1921 novel is often seen as a forerunner to Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, but it exists in a creepy league all of its own. A darkly comic story of a naïve young woman being sucked into marriage with a manipulative narcissistic husband, it’s a brilliant depiction of coercive control.

Poor Cow by Nell Dunn

Along with her stories in Up the Junction, this novel established Dunn as an amazingly faithful and sympathetic chronicler of 1960s London working-class life. Controversial in its day because of its frankness about female desire, prostitution and petty thievery, it is clear-eyed, unsentimental, still quite startling, but incredibly warm. I adore this book.

A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous

The author of this astonishing diary was trapped in Berlin when the city was captured by the Soviet Army at the end of the war, and she writes with devastating clarity of life in the ruins: of hunger, humiliation, forced labour and rape. Not exactly a cheery festive read – but gripping, intensely moving, and, in the end, surprisingly uplifting.

Sarah Waters is the author of Virago favourites Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith and The Little Stranger

Five Virago books everyone should read by Lucy Scholes

Trust me when I say that my picks took much deliberation – I found myself skimming the pages of books I’ve loved for years, Rosamond Lehmann’s The Weather in the Streets, Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado and Elizabeth Taylor’s The Soul of Kindness amongst them, while remembering all over again just how perfect a novel Dorothy West’s The Wedding is. Then I got to thinking about more recent publications: Gayl Jones’s Palmares, for example; or a stand-out title from a few years back, Rosa Rankin-Gee’s The Last Kings of Sark. My list could go on and on . . .

The Vet’s Daughter by Barbara Comyns

Since it so excellently showcases her eye for the grotesque, this is one of my favourites of all Comyns’s weird and wonderful novels. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, in the grimy backstreets of Battersea – and culminating in a truly unforgettable and dreadful denouement on Clapham Common – The Vet’s Daughter is suburban gothic with just a sprinkling of magical realism. It’s the strange, sad story of Alice Rowlands, a young girl who lives with her sadistic veterinarian father. It’s tragic, comic and utterly bonkers all in one, and features levitation, a terrible house fire, a neurotic parrot locked in a lavatory, and a ‘partly-cooked’ cat. What more could you want?!

Home by Marilynne Robinson

With the publication, earlier this year, of Jack – the fourth volume in Robinson’s Gilead series – I found myself re-reading the novels that precede it, and was thus reminded of how heartbreakingly and exquisitely flawless Home (the second book in the sequence) is in particular. Robinson – a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction – has been widely hailed as one of America’s greatest living novelists, but this, I think, has to be one of the finest novels ever written. Set in mid-century, rural Iowa, in Home a troubled prodigal son returns home after twenty years’ absence, shaking up the lives of those closest to him. It’s an understated tale of love, death and family ties, but it’s written with such grace and compassion, it moves me like nothing else.

Wayward by Dana Spiotta

Ever feel like just saying ‘What the hell!’ to everything and blowing up your own life? If so, this is the novel for you. Wayward is the story of one woman’s mid-life crisis, but it’s also about so much more than that. Her heroine Sam – a white, middle-aged, middle-class suburban wife and mother – falls in love with a fixer-upper house in downtown Syracuse, and before she knows it, she’s left her husband and their teenage daughter and is starting over, by herself and on her own terms. It’s a novel about mothers and daughters, about love and sex, about ageing, about how the hell to go on living in this horrible, messed-up world. It’s also utterly brilliant.

The Narrows by Ann Petry

Ann Petry’s debut, The Street, was the first novel written by a Black American writer to sell over a million copies, but it’s her third novel, The Narrows – originally published in 1953 – that’s undoubtedly her masterpiece. It’s the gripping tale of star-crossed but doomed lovers, Link Williams and Camilla Treadway Sheffield. Both young and beautiful, and living in the same town, but he’s Black and she’s white. Their fateful entanglement, and the tragic consequences which ensue, are at the heart of the story, but it’s also a richly detailed portrait of a small town in Connecticut, life in which is very different depending on the colour of your skin.

Love Marriage by Monica Ali

The acclaimed writer of Brick Lane’s first new novel in a decade is an absolute joy from start to finish. A gloriously big-hearted tale about a tangled web of secrets, lies and betrayals across two generations, and between two different families, all of whom are drawn together in the run up to a young couple’s impending wedding. These are characters who are a pleasure to spend time with; they’re each funny and flawed, loving and troubled in their own ways. And, all the more impressively, Ali keeps us on our toes throughout. I’m not saying there’s no happily ever after, but it might not be the happily ever after that you expect!