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1 Lagardère SCA owns these brands in the United Kingdom only. These brands are owned by Scholastic Corporation in the United States. | |||||||
| International | |
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| Parent company | Hachette Livre |
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| Founded | 1973 |
| Founder | Carmen Callil |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Key people | Lennie Goodings (editor) Ursula Owen (founding director) |
| Nonfiction topics | Feminism |
| Official website | http://www.virago.co.uk/ |
Virago is a British publisher of women's writing and books on feminist topics. [1] Started and run by women in the 1970s and bolstered by the success of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), Virago has been credited as one of several British feminist presses that helped address inequitable gender dynamics in publishing. [2] Unlike alternative, anti-capitalist publishing projects and zines coming out of feminist collectives and socialist circles, Virago branded itself as a commercial alternative to the male-dominated publishing industry and sought to compete with mainstream international presses. [3] [4]
Virago was founded in 1973 by Carmen Callil, primarily to publish books by women writers. It was originally known as Spare Rib Books, [5] sharing a name with the most famous magazine of the British women's liberation movement or second-wave feminism. The first issue of Spare Rib magazine, whose founders included Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe, was published in June 1972. [6] From the start, Virago published two sorts of books: original works, and out-of-print books by neglected female writers. The latter were reissued under the "Modern Classics" insignia, which launched in 1978 with Frost in May , a novel by the British author Antonia White originally published in 1933. The Virago list also contains works with feminist themes by male authors, such as H. G. Wells. Valentine Cunningham has praised Virago for trawling "most impressively and fruitfully in the novel catalogues" of the 1930s for women's fiction to reprint. [7]
In 1982, Virago became a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chatto, Virago, Bodley Head, and Cape Group (CVBC), but in 1987 Callil, Lennie Goodings, Ursula Owen, Alexandra Pringle, and Harriet Spicer put together a management buy-out from CVBC, then owned by Random House, USA. The buy-out was financed by Rothschild Ventures and Robert Gavron. Random House UK kept a ten per cent stake in the company, and continued to handle sales and distribution. In 1993 Rothschild Ventures sold their shares to the directors and Gavron, who thus became the largest single shareholder.
After a downturn in the market forced a reduction in activity, the board decided to sell the company to Little, Brown, of which Virago became an imprint in 1996 (with Lennie Goodings as Publisher and Sally Abbey as Senior Editor). The sale to Little Brown, a large company owned by the telecommunications giant Time Warner, was met with negative publicity and raised questions about the future of feminist publishing houses. [3] In 2006, Virago's parent company[ which? ] [8] became part of publishing group Hachette Livre. Lennie Goodings remains as editor and publisher.
In 2008 the British Library acquired the Virago Press Archive consisting of organisational papers, author/editor files, publicity materials and photographs. [9]
Virago was the subject of an hour-long BBC Four television documentary, [10] Virago: Changing the World One Page at a Time, that was first broadcast in October 2016. [11]
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)| International | |
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Rosel Marie "Rosie" Boycott, Baroness Boycott is a British journalist and feminist.
Dame Carmen Thérèse Callil, was an Australian publisher, writer and critic who spent most of her career in the United Kingdom. She founded Virago Press in 1973 and received the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature in 2017. She has been described by Gail Rebuck as "the most extraordinary publisher of her generation".
Felice Newman is an American author, publisher, sex educator, and coach of soma studies.
Spare Rib was a second-wave feminist magazine, founded in 1972 in the United Kingdom, that emerged from the counter culture of the late 1960s as a consequence of meetings involving, among others, Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe. Spare Rib is now recognised as an iconic magazine, which shaped debate about feminism in the UK, and as such it was digitised by the British Library in 2015. The magazine contained new writing and creative contributions that challenged stereotypes and supported collective solutions. It was published between 1972 and 1993. The title derives from the Biblical reference to Eve, the first woman, created from Adam's rib.
The academic discipline of women's writing is a discrete area of literary studies which is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their sex, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men." It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her sex, i.e. her position as a woman within the literary world.
Michèle Brigitte Roberts FRSL is a British writer, novelist and poet. She is the daughter of a French Catholic teacher mother and English Protestant father, and has dual UK–France nationality.
Susan Ann "Sue" Butterworth was a British bookseller and activist, co-founder of Silver Moon Bookshop in 1984, and editor of the store's newsletter, Silver Moon Quarterly.
The Silver Moon Bookshop was a feminist bookstore on Charing Cross Road in London founded in 1984 by Jane Cholmeley, Sue Butterworth, and Jane Anger. They established Silver Moon Bookshop to share intersectional feminist rhetoric with a larger community of readers and encourage open discussion of women’s issues. The shop served both as a safe space for women to participate in literary events and a resource center to learn about local feminist initiatives. The owners of Silver Moon Bookshop eventually expanded into the publishing field through establishing Silver Moon Books, as well as creating the store newsletter Silver Moon Quarterly.
Zoe Fairbairns is a British feminist writer who has authored novels, short stories, radio plays and political pamphlets.
Ann Scott is a British feminist author born in London to an American father and British mother.
Marsha Rowe is an Australian-born journalist, writer and editor now living in the United Kingdom. In 1972, she was co-founder, with Rosie Boycott, of the leading feminist magazine Spare Rib.
Annette Frieda Kuhn, FBA is a British author, cultural historian, educator, researcher, editor and feminist. She is known for her work in screen studies, visual culture, film history and cultural memory. She is Professor and Research Fellow in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London.
Women in Publishing (WiP) is a London-based group, established in 1979, that works to promote the status of women working in the publishing industry and related trades by helping women to develop their careers. Their founding aims – "to encourage networking, to provide opportunities for sharing information and ideas and to offer training for career and personal development – still stand in the so-called ‘post-feminist’ era, where women dominate the publishing industry by sheer numbers, but have barely broken through the glass ceiling."
Feminist businesses are companies established by activists involved in the feminist movement. Examples include feminist bookstores, feminist credit unions, feminist presses, feminist mail-order catalogs, and feminist restaurants. These businesses flourished as part of the second and third-waves of feminism in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Feminist entrepreneurs established organizations such as the Feminist Economic Alliance to advance their cause. Feminist entrepreneurs sought three primary goals: to disseminate their ideology through their businesses, to create public spaces for women and feminists, and to create jobs for women so that they did not have to depend on men financially. While they still exist today, the number of some feminist businesses, particularly women's bookstores, has declined precipitously since 2000.
This is a Timeline of second-wave feminism, from its beginning in the mid-twentieth century, to the start of Third-wave feminism in the early 1990s.
Alexandra Pringle, Hon FRSL, is a British publisher. A founding Director of Virago Press, she has been Editor-in-Chief of Bloomsbury Publishing since 2000.
Lennie Goodings is a Canadian-born publisher active in the United Kingdom. She is Chair of the UK British publishing house Virago Press.
The Women's Press was a feminist publishing company established in London in 1977. Throughout the late 1970s and the 1980s, the Women's Press was a highly visible presence, publishing feminist literature.
Publications Distribution Cooperative (PDC) was set up in 1976 to distribute radical, socialist, feminist, green/ecology and community publications in Britain to the book and newsagent trade.
