The books interview: as women's imprint Virago turns 40, its boss declares herself ever ready to take a risk on an author
Some authors have strong, early memories of reading or listening to stories. Publisher Lennie Goodings recalls the first time she corrected one. "I do remember finding my first typo when I was about five," she says. "I pointed it out to my mother and that was when it first dawned on me that there were humans behind books. It felt like a secret discovery."
Goodings has one of the most distinctive jobs in the British book trade. As the boss at Virago, once a trailblazing feminist independent and now an imprint at Little, Brown (owned since 2006 by French giant Hachette), she leads the company that was the business wing of the women's movement in literature.
This might sound niche, but it wasn't. A great deal of feminist energy in the 60s and 70s went into figuring out what were the forces other than laws that kept women down. We had the vote and the Equal Pay Act. So why were women still so powerless? Culture, feminists decided, was the answer (or part of it). What was required was an overhaul of our ideas about gender.
Women needed to take charge of their own stories, the argument ran. Our lives and experiences had been ignored in the official versions, leaving us dependent, unconfident and indoctrinated with rubbish about our inferiority. Into this gap marched Virago, on a mission to promote books by women. The idea and the money were Carmen Callil's, and Spare Rib founders Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe were also involved. Like Spare Rib, Virago referenced the Garden of Eden with a logo of an apple with a chunk bitten out of it: tree of knowledge, here we come.
Goodings, who joined five years later, calls herself "a second-generation Virago" but she was there early enough for it to feel like a start-up: "We were at 5 Wardour Street, five flights up a dusty staircase in one room. We arrived at 9.30 and worked flat-out, we did all the cleaning and things like that. There was food provided but then of course the food meant you couldn't leave – unless you were going out for lunch, for work." In early photographs of the all-female team she wears big, round glasses.
She recalls one lunch with a literary editor of the Times who "got there and said [she puts on a patrician drawl]: 'I told all the girls in the office I'm going out with a Virago today!' That's how we were regarded. There was resistance, I remember some booksellers would say 'there are no feminists in this town, there is nobody who wants to read those kinds of books.' But you also had secret allies, you'd get letters from librarians or young women in bookshops."
At the time, Goodings says "publishing was pretty Oxbridge and centred around the Georgian buildings of Bedford Square. You felt you were flying in the face of the establishment and that was exciting, but you also felt you were in touch with what was really happening. Out on the streets women were marching, it was CND time, I was living in a housing co-op and later I lived in a squat so it felt like a mix of counterculture, feminism, all sorts."
This month Virago celebrates its 40th anniversary, and publishes a birthday book. Virago is 40: A Celebration brings together new writing by authors including Margaret Atwood and Sarah Waters, on the subject of 40. What might seem a non‑landmark anniversary – 40 not 50 – is made by these writers into the basis for a resonant tribute. After all, in human lives 40 is a milestone. "It was shortly after the big four-oh, in a car park somewhere in the arid wastes of suburbia, when I was Tasered with the realisation that I would never again have to go on a crash diet" is how South African novelist Lauren Liebenberg opens her fiery burst of autobiography in the new book.
I liked Lisa Appignanesi's "Doggerel Toast" to her publisher ("Consider – at Forty/ Dorothy Parker having rued/ 'How like me to put all my eggs into one bastard'"), Victoria Glendinning's memoir of her late husband and two essays in praise of sleep. There are pieces on the 1940s – a crucial decade for British women when war led to so many going out to work – and about the writers Rebecca West and Adrienne Rich. This is Michèle Roberts on Colette: "She had the kind of face/ that launched a thousand ships./ She was forty round the waist/ the bosom and the hips./ That's what comes of eating/ lots of steak and chips."
In her introduction to the book Goodings stresses Virago's unique purpose and her belief that reading "can change the world", but also that she is at the helm of a profitable business. Several times she uses the word "brand", which is eye-catching given that Marsha Rowe recently published an article rejecting the same term on Spare Rib's behalf. Does Goodings understand why some of her contemporaries want to distance themselves from this kind of market-speak?
"Yes, but you know one of the reasons Virago survived is that people recognise it as a brand with a genuine philosophy. A brand is something people recognise whether they like it or not. Spare Rib is a brand actually, isn't it, in the sense Virago is a brand? Sarah Waters is a brand as well."
Virago has made a profit every year since it was set up ("a healthy profit", Goodings adds, though she won't say how much on an annual turnover that averages around £3.5m), and she is proud of this. "There's no point being the greatest thing in the world if you can't survive," she says. "I guess it's fair to call it pragmatic but we're not a charity, we're not a political movement, we reflect what's going on but we're not a library, we're a business."
She says all Virago's owners have been supportive, and even when the company decided to sell itself to Little, Brown in the doldrums of the mid-1990s, when cutbacks on backlist orders hit them hard, they managed to avoid any near-death experiences. "We were not in great shape at that point," she says, "we really did struggle and we didn't all agree on what we should do, but we needed more capital. You need capital as a publisher because it's a gambling game – you say to an author: I think you could write a book, here's some money!"
Goodings, who is 60 this year, relishes this risk-taking side of her job and has no plans to scale back, still less retire. "I love the making of a book, I love the clash between commerce and art and the subversive quality of thinking, right, if you talk about this book in a certain way you can get it in people's hands." Recent commentary on publishing has suggested a decline in the status of editors, as they have lost out both to powerful agents and to marketing departments with their own ideas about what sells books, and which books sell. But Goodings says she was never a good copy-editor in the first place, having begun her career as a publicist, and that she is as involved as she ever was. "If I'm just buying stuff and handing it to someone else to edit, I don't think I'm very interested."
She was born in 1943 in Ontario, the first of five children of a nurse and civil engineer. Her mother, now 85, "was a huge reader, still is", her father gave up work only recently, having spent the past two decades on projects in the developing world. She is proud of their commitment to public service and goes home to Canada with her son and daughter every year. "I wouldn't say I ever feel English," she says, "but I can feel a Londoner – that's the joy of London." Her husband is an American academic.
Working in a bookshop on Vancouver Island after college she found herself intrigued by the publicity people who would turn up to promote their wares. "I thought: who makes the decisions about what gets published? I decided to look into it." A Canadian novel, The Diviners by Margaret Laurence, in which the young heroine is in love with two men but rejects both in favour of adventure, inspired her to take off. "I thought yes, I can do that," and headed for London, where she picked up work promoting Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds and a biography of the Queen before deciding she needed to find a job more aligned with her political views. She wrote to Writers and Readers, the publishing co-operative behind Marx for Beginners, and then to Carmen Callil at Virago, offering her services, and not realising that Callil was herself an experienced publicist.
But Callil, who is Australian, liked what Goodings calls her "very Canadian chutzpah", and once in the door – one day a week on a salary of £3,750 (she still has her first job description, an indication perhaps that she knew souvenirs of the project might one day be called for). Callil and others, including Alexandra Pringle, now editor in chief at Bloomsbury, moved on. Goodings got the top job without a fight.
There were other specialist women's publishers at the time, but with its Modern Classics series Virago set about redefining what a classic was. Antonia White's autobiographical Frost in May was the first book. Other authors included Rosamond Lehmann and Maya Angelou.
But while she cherishes this heritage, Goodings's own focus is contemporary. Virago publishes around 50 books a year, a third of which are new fiction, a third non‑fiction and a third classics. Prized novelists include Waters and Sarah Dunant – authors of Virago's two top‑selling titles last year – and Marilynne Robinson, who won the Orange prize for Home in 2009, a moment Goodings cites as a career highlight.
Recent additions to the list include Rachel Seiffert and Claire Messud, and talking to Goodings it's hard not to feel that fiction is where her real interest lies. Asked why she thinks men read fewer novels than women, and fewer novels by women in particular, she suggests men have "an anxiety about identity". She likens the choice between fiction and non-fiction to "a deeper conversation about what truth is at some level, because I think there's a suspicion among some men that you read novels for entertainment, but for finding out about life you read non-fiction. Whereas I think anyone who reads fiction understands that you can get a greater truth there."
She says she has no agenda for fiction beyond a belief in its quality; critics might point to a preponderance of character-led realism and lack of formal experiment or voices from the developing world – evidence of an aversion to risk perhaps? But Goodings says second-guessing the market is futile: "I do love that about publishing I have to admit, that you can't tell. Sarah Waters writing about lesbians. I mean, you know! At Little, Brown one year Marilynne Robinson wins the Orange prize, then Stephenie Meyer [author of the Twilight novels] comes out of the Orbit children's list. Publishing is a big crapshoot, definitely."
Once she's read a book, she tells an author what she thinks about their manuscript as kindly as possible, and after that it's up to them. "What is an editor? An editor is just a heightened reader really, a super-reader who reads with their antennae on full alert. The world is littered with editors who've turned down books that have gone on to great success, so you have to have a humbleness about that. If an author disagrees with you they might be right."
But Goodings enjoys a tussle too. From its earliest days Virago was attacked by some feminists as not radical enough. Over the past few years she made a conscious decision to back some polemics. She published Naomi Wolf's much-criticised Vagina, which linked women's orgasms to creativity, and Natasha Walters's Living Dolls, on the power of the sex industry.
Goodings wrote a piece for this year's Fifty Shades of Feminism anthology and says she was nervous about this rare foray into authorship (she wrote a children's book in 2001). "Is it bad to be bossy when one is the boss?" was the question she asked, and answered by saying women would be better off if we stopped thinking of ourselves as a "minority group".
But this doesn't mean abolishing her women's imprint or the Baileys women's prize for fiction (formerly the Orange prize) that she has championed since its launch. "I'm not going to feel defensive about Virago until the Today programme changes," she says, referring to the fact that just 18% of contributors to the flagship news show are female. "It's a tougher and more uneven world, and there's a certain level of contradictoriness that we just to have live with."
And if not everyone agrees with her, or approves of Virago, or wants to be published by a women-only imprint, so much the better: "The last thing you want to be is a flat old thing that everybody loves, like a big teddy bear. I don't feel that's our job."
Virago is 40: A Celebration is available as a free ebook at virago.co.uk