The inside story of working for Carmen Callil

Forty-seven years ago, Virago paperbacks, with their stylish green spines and hint-of-the-transgressive colophons of a red apple with a bite out of it, revolutionised British publishing in a way that had not been seen since Allen Lane’s Penguins in the 1930s.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the firm permanently altered a nation’s reading habits. Founded in 1973, three years after the Equal Pay Act and with the Sex Discrimination Act just two years away, Virago had a clear feminist objective. It wanted to produce books that gave a voice to the 52 per cent of the population under-represented in a world of mainstream publishing still largely run through the old boys’ network. Its mission was to help women understand their history, to establish a female literary canon and to make visible the experience of modern women in new, empowering portrayals in both fiction and non-fiction.

With regard to the last of these, the novelist Angela Carter caught the raucous exhilaration of the moment when she wrote that she hoped that no daughter of hers would ever be in the position to write — ‘for all its exquisite prose’— By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, and might attempt something more along the lines of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Tore Off His Balls.

Lennie Goodings was at Virago almost from the beginning, ‘a small town kid from Canada’ employed by the Australian Carmen Callil, one of the founders, to work in publicity, a vital area for the new imprint.