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Carmen Callil
Breaking a silence: Carmen Callil. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
Breaking a silence: Carmen Callil. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

The stories of our lives

Carmen Callil set up Virago to publish books that celebrated women - and dreamt of shelves of green paperbacks all over the world. The Modern Classics list gave voice to generations of novelists who might have been forgotten - three decades later it is as important as ever. She remembers how it all began

The Virago Modern Classics really began in a convent over 60 years ago. It was the sort of Catholic convent that should have been in deepest Ireland, but was, in fact, in one of the more elegant suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. There I was sent when I was eight, and from it I was disgorged at 16. The Loreto nuns who educated me were semi-enclosed, which meant no speech from dusk to dawn, Mass every morning at 6.20am, a tomato for supper on Sunday nights and much Irish brown bread the rest of the time. Rules, censorship and silence, and above all a sense of disapproval waiting to pounce on those rare times when you felt most entirely yourself. And an obsession with sin. What sort of sin? Answers came there none.

Until 1977, when the writer Michael Holroyd insisted I read Antonia White's Frost in May. This novel, about a nine-year-old girl closeted in an English convent, is a classic - funny, wonderfully written, its heroine a young Everywoman up against an authoritarian and frightening body of adults who insist on subduing her spirit in the name of God. Rosamond Lehmann used to tell me how often her readers wrote to her exclaiming of one of her novels: "This is my story." Frost in May was mine. I had to republish it.

I had arrived in London by 1960, and five years later, with good and bad luck, I had begun to work in book publishing. I was a "publicity girl", then one of the few jobs available to women who did not want to be secretaries. It was the 60s - to me, a decade of nonchalance, friendships and discovery. Work was my drug of choice, and in those days it felt as though anybody could do anything.

1968 was a turning point: Paris, Grosvenor Square, the anti-apartheid movement, the underground press of Oz, Frendz, International Times. Mostly I spent my time with an Australian mafia who were, in words Angela Carter later used to describe me, libertarian anarchists. In truth, at that point, I fear that Angie had no concept of the Australian bourgeois comfort and attitudes which produced "such as we". Some of us were hippies, but most were writers, journalists or in television. We lived well, worked and drank hard, and would not be seen dead in anything but the very best Ossie Clark.

I came to feminism through the offices of Ink newspaper in Princedale Road, London W11, led there by my Australian mafia. Ink, an offshoot of Oz, was a weekly newspaper that Richard Neville, Andrew Fisher, Ed Victor and Felix Dennis had decided to launch as a bridge between the underground press of the 1960s and the national newspapers of that time. Whatever we women did for Ink - and there were many of us - in my memory the lovely men of the left and of hippiedom treated us like fluttering tinkerbells, good for making tea and providing sex.

Poor Ink. Launched in April 1971, it collapsed with the Oz trial for obscenity of that summer, which justifiably took most of Richard and Felix's energies. By April 1972, Ink was in liquidation, but the women I met there sent me on my way. The first was another Australian, Marsha Rowe, so irritated by her experiences - "we were seen as chicks" - that, with others, she held a series of women's meetings. Out of these sprang the feminist magazine Spare Rib, which Marsha started with Rosie Boycott, who was working on Frendz magazine at the time. I did the publicity for the first issue of Spare Rib in June 1972, and one day, when having a drink in a pub in Goodge Street, the idea for my publishing company came to me like the switching on of a light bulb.

I remember my ambitions clearly. I started Virago to break a silence, to make women's voices heard, to tell women's stories, my story and theirs. How often I remember sitting at dinner tables in the 1960s, the men talking to each other about serious matters, the women sitting quietly like decorated lumps of sugar. I remember one such occasion when I raised my fist, banged the table and shouted: "I have views on Bangladesh too!"

My inspiration was always literary. It was books and writers and writing I loved. I always believed that books change lives, that writers change lives, and I still believe it. I also believed - still do - that injustice corrupts those who are responsible for it, and I wanted change for our brothers, husbands, uncles, fathers too. I started Virago to publish books which celebrated women and women's lives, and which would, by so doing, spread the message of women's liberation to the whole population and knock on the head for ever the idea that it was anything to do with burning bras or hating men. Looking back, the arrogance of our position ("you will change whether you like it or not, dammit") is striking.

Marsha and Rosie became directors of my new company. Rosie proved to be exactly my kind of companion-in-arms. We spent hours trawling through books on goddesses ancient and modern, until Rosie spotted an entry for a female warrior, a Virago. We chose it for this heroic meaning: a strong, courageous, outspoken woman, a battler. Irreverence and heroism, that's what we wanted.

To finance it, I continued to do publicity for publishers and whatever came to hand, my logo an apple standing on one foot, underneath it inscribed "Anything outrageous suitably publicised". The apple was done by a desginer friend who created the first cover for Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch

I lived off the Kings Road at the time, in an attic bedsitter above a synagogue. On Saturdays the chant from below mixed with the noise of Carly Simon's "You're So Vain" bellowing from the shops in the road, as I strode up and down the street exuding style and commitment: not just to women and what women did, but to everything that might change the world.

Harriet Spicer, who now chooses Britain's judges as a member of the Judicial Appointments Commission (an equally difficult task), became my assistant, her first job, straight from Oxford. Her heroic activity was to keep the publicity work, which partially financed Virago, ticking over, while I darted around in pursuit of books to publish. I have always found it strange that my impatient personality chose this slowest and most frustrating form of expression. Finding authors, nurturing their books, and then mothering them through the publishing process generally takes years. By 1975, the first list was ready.

Women surged up the steep stairs to my attic: some of them were angry women - why did I give my women's publishing company such an aggressive, man-hating name? Irony, I would reply. Others toiled upstairs with manuscripts on Russian women revolutionaries, goddesses, interviews with women famous and unknown, children, motherhood, cancer, the vagina and all its works. Most asked: Can I help? And many did; hundreds of women and men helped me start Virago. Anna Coote, whom I met on Ink - she was a reporter, a blonde beauty floating around in a kaftan, this again probably more appreciated on Ink than her incisive brain - found me my first author when she sent her friend Mary Chamberlain to climb up my stairs. Her book Fenwoman: A Portrait of Women in an English Village was the very first Virago.

All my closest friends helped me in those early years. Foremost was Liz Calder, later the founder editor of Bloomsbury. The writer and editor John Knowler unearthed Margaret Atwood and Grace Paley for me. Philippa Harrison, years later, took Virago under her umbrella when we sold the company to Little, Brown in 1995. Sonny Mehta, now publisher of Knopf in the US, led me silently (as ever) and patiently through the complex mysteries of publishing. The literary agent Deborah Rogers, the presiding literary presence of the 70s, was another. In all the copious attention given to Virago over the years, it is rarely noticed how much it was a product of a younger generation of British publishers and agents who were part of the rebellious - and generous - times in which we all lived.

Another publisher, Christopher MacLehose, put me in touch with Ursula Owen, whom I hired as a part-time editor in 1974. Ursula belonged to the socialist, academic, philosophical world of British feminism, and had contacts and insights quite different from mine. After her arrival, and the first books had been published, my literary tastes encountered the purer waters of European socialism and feminism. Until 1976, I had financed Virago by my work, a tiny bank overdraft (all they would give me) and, both then and later, through the deep eccentricities of my turbulent family.

The first nine books were published in association with Quartet Books. This was insufficient freedom on all fronts, and the three of us - Ursula, Harriet and myself - struggled to raise money for Virago to become an independent publishing company. This we did in 1976. Harriet bought 20% of the company; I gave Ursula 30% of it (she had earned it); and the rest remained mine. By 1978, Alexandra Pringle, now editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury, and Lennie Goodings, publisher of Virago today, had made us a quintet. Later, with the influx of a younger generation of women, ownership and the list changed, but these five women were the core of Virago when the novels re-published as Virago Modern Classics first entered the world.

Ursula brought to Virago women who formed a part of our advisory group, 30 to 40 women made up of my connections, and hers. The historians and academics Ursula knew, already well versed in the new study of women's history, were experts on women's lives recorded in memoirs and autobiographies, in most cases books that had been out of print for decades. Our advisers directed us back to women's writing of the past, suggested writers, wrote introductions, spread the word and for each of us, in different ways, became a community of friends retained today.

But, until I thought up the idea of the Virago Modern Classics, I remained uneasy. Rosie and Marsha, after sterling work in the early years, had disappeared into the hectic life of Spare Rib, and I was sorely out of place in the sombre waters of socialist feminism. I had a libertarian dread of preaching to people and an Australian longing for people to answer back. And, god knows, those early days of feminism were serious days, which in many ways took me back to the atmosphere of my convent. In the service of The Cause, we were monstrously hard on each other. All movements thrive on a sense of pouncing disapproval in the air.

And so, if founding Virago was my first light bulb, dreaming up the Classics was the second. How could I publish Frost in May? The answer came quite easily: here was the celebration and fun I was looking for, here was a way of illuminating women's history in a way that would reach out to a much wider audience of both women and men. I would publish a multitude of novels, I would publish them in a series, I would market them as a brand, just like Penguin. If one novel could tell the story of my life, there were hundreds more, and thousands of readers who would feel as I did.

I consulted my colleagues, my fixation reaching such a degree that poor Harriet tells of me pinning our designer to the wall, demanding five colour covers, exquisite paper, washed tops, strings, and every production frill for my beloved new idea. Penguin used a serious male thinker - Isaac Newton? - to advertise their classics. The Virago Modern Classics list was meant to be more ebullient, a library of women's fiction with Boadicea rather than Newton waving the flag. I chose green because it was neither blue for a boy nor pink for a girl. I saw in my mind rows of green paperbacks with luscious covers on all the bookshelves of the world.

The idea sprang in part from the women's movement, but also from my past: from my father's vast library in which I had buried myself during my childhood, and from my mother's love of reading, and of reading aloud to us, her four children. (A number of the novels we were to publish as Classics came from my mother: Willa Cather, Christina Stead, Henry Handl Richardson, and more. To this day, she remains the only person I have known who read Dorothy Richardson's four-volume sequence Pilgrimage from beginning to end.) And, of course, from hundreds of women and men who cared not one jot for feminism. In the pre-pill and pre-abortion days of the early 60s, those of us unfortunate enough to need abortions passed around copies of Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets, in hardback editions bought at secondhand bookshops. This novel, alas, was all too often "the story" of women before the Abortion Act of 1967.

In the publishing world of the 60s and 70s, women rarely had the opportunity to choose which books to publish, and paperback lists, particularly, reflected this. But now the choice of novels was mine. It was common to think of the literary tradition that runs from Jane Austen through Ivy Compton-Burnett to Barbara Pym as a clever and witty women's view of a small domestic world. This was not a ghetto we accepted. The female tradition included writers of vast ambition and great achievement: mistresses of comedy, drama, storytelling, of the domestic world we knew and loved. I saw a large world, not a small canvas, with all of human life on display, a great library of women's fiction, marginalised, silenced, out of print and unavailable. Such writing has always been part of women's history. We despised the concepts of "woman novelist", and "female imagination", so often used to dismiss books we cherished.

The first five classics were published in 1978. Michael Holroyd suggested Mr Fortune's Maggot and The True Heart by Sylvia Townsend Warner, as well as Frost in May. Holroyd and Angela Carter had a profound influence on the list. Angie admired the ambitious and complex novels of Christina Stead as the very opposite of the "small English novel". Stead's Letty Fox: Her Luck and For Love Alone were the next Classics. Stevie Smith's The Holiday came next, and the eighth was Margaret Atwood's Surfacing. Thirty years later, Virago still publishes Atwood's paperbacks.

Then followed years of dedicated reading, and within four years the list was a hundred novels strong. In those days I was an insomniac, but I also curtailed my high life: 10pm and I was off to the stack of novels, usually borrowed from the London Library, which lay in piles around my bed. My company was an army of remarkably named women - E Arnot Robertson, F Tennyson Jesse, Elizabeth von Arnim, EM Delafield - and enchanting titles: I'm Not Complaining (Ruth Adam), Tea at Four O'Clock (Janet McNeill), The Brontës Went to Woolworths (Rachel Ferguson), Cassandra at the Wedding (Dorothy Baker). Those days spent in the London Library were some of the happiest of my life. One author led to another, for if Virago itself was very much the product of a particular generation of British publishers, the Virago Modern Classics became what Lennie Goodings describes as "a uniquely collaborative enterprise", as forgotten novels and neglected writers bloomed like a watered desert. It seemed as though the whole world entered the fray. First came readers - their letters poured in, about books they loved (they still write, but on the internet). Recommendations followed from bookshops, from academics, librarians, from our friends and relations, from literary agents and publishers, author's families too.

But the biggest contribution came from writers whose names read like a roll call of the best of our time. Each of them seemed to choose a writer they loved best to write about in introductions to our reissues and elsewhere: AS Byatt twinned herself with Willa Cather; Victoria Glendinning with Rebecca West and Vita Sackville West; Polly Devlin with Molly Keane; Janet Watts with Rosamond Lehmann; Sally Beauman with EH Young; Anita Brookner with Margaret Kennedy. Germaine Greer wrote about Henry Handl Richardson. Jenny Uglow and Hermione Lee would turn their hands to any of them, though I always thought of Hermione as the champion of Edith Wharton. Margaret Drabble wrote about her friend Nell Dunn. The much-lamented Paul Foot advocated Olive Schreiner, Penelope Fitzgerald Mrs Oliphant. Susannah Clapp and Paul Bailey were attached to perhaps my favourite Virago Modern Classic author, Elizabeth Taylor. Penelope Lively, Lorna Sage, Marina Warner, Maeve Binchey, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Anita Desai - the names are legion. Today younger writers - Sarah Waters, Jonathan Coe, Julie Myerson, Justine Picardie - do the same.

The Classics became a sort of cultural game, one writer connected to another as in snakes and ladders. Snakes were few, though I became very tired of writers I was about to republish who would stare at me pointedly and say "I like men you know"; Christina Stead turned out to be a Stalinist monster of the very first order. But mostly they were ladders. Virginia Woolf had expressed the greatest admiration for FM Mayor. So had EM Forster. Woolf recommended the book to Elizabeth Jenkins. Rosamond Lehmann led me to Elizabeth Jenkins, and so the chain became longer. In 1978, many of my heroines were still alive. Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote to me comfortingly about my lack of knowledge of classical Greek; Sylvie Ashton Warner wrote, "Dear publisher with the exotic name, I would prefer it if you were called Karmin Kahlil." In pursuit of Jane Bowles an amazing correspondence developed between Paul Bowles and me about the copyright in Jane's work, which the publisher Peter Owen said belonged to him.

Of the older generation, the writer I loved most was Antonia White, who provided me with whisky, cigarettes and affection until her death in 1980, and Rosamond Lehmann, my friend for a decade, who knew or recommended every writer of her time: May Sinclair, FM Mayor, Sybil Bedford, Rose Macaulay, Elizabeth Jenkins. Dismissing Tillie Olsen's worthy sentiments about the limitations of the housewife's lot, Angela Carter wrote: "I can only say that the only time I ever iron the sheets or make meringues is when there is an absolutely urgent deadline in the offing . . ." Margaret Atwood wrote comforting words about Maggie Thatcher "at least her ears don't wiggle when she talks". Graham Greene, who approved of me because of Antonia White, suggested Barbara Comyns (her husband had been a colleague of his when both were some sort of British spy during the war). The letters of Rebecca West to Virago are on occasion masterpieces of vitriol. Stevie Smith's executor wanted me to know how much she disliked George Orwell.

As the list grew, we covered the world. There were Irish classics, Scottish classics, Australian, Victorian, Canadian, American, New Zealand, Caribbean, 20th-century classics, but my favourites will always be the English classics, which reveal more about life on this island than a hundred history books. I have always loved flawed novels, as well as those of the great and good. In explaining my literary stance at the time I wrote: "by the word 'classic' we do not always mean 'great', though we often do. And then there is laughter: this is the secret key to instant republication as a Virago Modern Classic." That said, we had our standards. For some years I chose all the Classics, but as time went by first Alexandra Pringle and then Lynn Knight (now a lecturer and biographer of the English potter Clarice Cliff) joined me, to form a trio that read everything. We had a limit known as the Whipple line, below which we would not sink. Dorothy Whipple was a popular novelist of the 1930s and 1940s whose prose and content absolutely defeated us. A considerable body of women novelists, who wrote like the very devil, bit the Virago dust when Alexandra, Lynn and I exchanged books and reports, on which I would scrawl a brief rejection: "Below the Whipple line."

The Virago archive is a treasure trove of correspondence with some of the best women writers of the 20th and current century, and founded as the company was before the advent of email, everything is still there in those files, letters often adorned with my filing instructions "put wherever". Today, I mourn the loss of my luscious green covers, but the younger generation - like me, 30 years ago - always wants change. The Virago Modern Classics are not finished, and never will be. They remain as a testament to a group of very energetic, devoted young women, to bad typewriters, often illegible handwriting, and long hours of deeply non-unionised work, reading and research. Now commissioning editor Donna Coonan, a toddler in 1978, is as addicted to, and as passionate about, the list as we all were then. In February, I went to speak to the Suffolk Book League. Afterwards a clutch of women, grey-haired like me, came up and one by one said, "Thank you so much." "My favourite is Winifred Holtby", "Your Classics got me through every pram I had in the hall" and "I love my shelf of green Viragos". It was the writers and their novels they were really thanking, women writing away in thankless times. All that was required was to know they were there, to love them, and to publish them.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Virago Modern Classics, eight hardbacks - Excellent Women by Barbara Pym, The Diary of a Provincial Lady by EM Delafield, A Game of Hide and Seek by Elizabeth Taylor, Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann, A Far Cry from Kensington by Muriel Spark, 84 Charing Cross by Helene Hanff, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter - will be republished with cover designs by leading female textile designers (Orla Kiely, Cath Kidston, Celia Birtwell, Barbara Hulanicki, Lucienne Day, Marion Dorn, Loïs Mailou Jones, Jacqueline Groag) on May 8, price £10 each.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Has Virago changed the publishing world's attitudes towards women?

  • Hilary Mantel faces six newcomers in contest for women's fiction prize

  • A classic example for other publishers

  • Judging books' covers: the new Virago Modern Classics series

  • Taking women off the shelf

  • EL James, JK Rowling, Hilary Mantel … the women who dominated publishing in 2012

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