| Parent company | Hachette Livre |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1973; 52 years ago (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 onfeminist topics.[1] Started and run by women in the 1970s and bolstered by the success of theWomen'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 political pamphlets 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 byCarmen Callil, primarily to publish books bywomen writers. It was originally known as Spare Rib Books,[5] sharing a name with the most famous magazine of the Britishwomen's liberation movement orsecond-wave feminism. The first issue ofSpare Rib magazine, whose founders includedRosie Boycott andMarsha Rowe, was published in June 1972.[6] From the start, Virago published two sorts of books: original works, andout-of-print books by neglected female writers. The latter were reissued under the "Modern Classics" insignia, which launched in 1978 withFrost in May, a novel by the British authorAntonia White originally published in 1933. The Virago list also contains works with feminist themes by male authors, such asH. 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 awholly owned subsidiary of theChatto, Virago,Bodley Head, andCape Group (CVBC), but in 1987 Callil,Lennie Goodings,Ursula Owen,Alexandra Pringle, andHarriet Spicer put together amanagement buy-out from CVBC, then owned byRandom House, USA. The buy-out was financed byRothschild Ventures andRobert Gavron. Random House UK kept a ten percent 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 toLittle, Brown, of which Virago became animprint 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 giantTime Warner, was met with negative publicity and raised questions about the future of feminist publishing houses.[3] In 2006, Little, Brown, Virago's parent company,[8] became part of publishing groupHachette Livre. Lennie Goodings remains as editor and publisher.
In 2008, theBritish 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-longBBC Four television documentary,Virago: Changing the World One Page at a Time, that was first broadcast in October 2016.[10][11]
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