An unmagnificent seven

One of the most interesting developments in modern publishing has surely been the revival of interest in women writers of the past. Beginning with Virago Press, publishers have delved back and rediscovered exceptional female writers from the 17th century onwards. These have either been rescued from oblivion, or from the frequent fate of being dismissed as middle-brow and narrowly domestic. Editors and a new generation of scholars have unearthed excellent writers, from Fanny Burney to Elizabeth Taylor, and have changed literary taste forever.

The success of the enterprise probably means that it is now easier to find a new readership for a once-popular female author than for a largely forgotten male author. The first generation of literary archaeologists had a traditional and rather strict criterion of literary quality. Carmen Callil, the founder of Virago, was very clear that there was a level beneath which those green-backed classics would not sink. Germaine Greer wrote an excellent and scrupulous book, Slip-shod Sibyls, arguing that many women poets of the past were actually very bad: they had no possibility of being otherwise.