Re-covering Women

D-M Withers focuses on two issues in this detailed examination of the early publishing and business practice of Virago as a feminist publisher. Their book ‘is concerned with the practice of timing and how timeliness is culturally constructed’, and also with ‘what conditions enable a book that has slipped out of cultural view to resonate (again) with contemporary readers’ (2, 1). By using Virago Books as a case study for examining the reprinting of older texts to bring women’s writing back into print, they instruct the reader in how Virago as a business materially contributed to the consolidation of second-wave feminism. Women’s history had been ‘hidden from history’, as the title of Sheila Rowbotham’s 1973 history of women’s suppression puts it. Virago’s reprints made this history accessible again, to a new and receptive readership. By ensuring that women’s lives were taken seriously by investing money in the republication of writing about those lives, Virago gave the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s, and one of its offshoots, the Feminist History Group, a foundation of feminist cultural heritage to build on. It is a dense but highly accessible read. Every sentence contains essential information. The shortness of the format (see below) encourages this: this is a highly compressed disquisition in which the good stuff has been retained and tangential excursions have been sieved out. While discussing a fairly specialized subject, this is also a useful potted history of Virago: reading Lennie Goodings’ A Bite of the Apple (2020), or indeed any other of the titles in the extensive bibliography, will fill in the picture at greater length. The value of this book is readability, and a mastery of the archival material that shows Withers’ strengths as a historian of print and of feminist history. Virago was incorporated as a limited company in 1973, as an imprint of Quartet Books, and became an independent company in 1976. This independence had to be funded by either investment or returns from sales, which led to a familiar dichotomy: by focusing on making money to ensure that the business could continue (and pay its staff and authors), D-M Withers, Virago Reprints and Modern Classics. The Timely Business of Feminist Publishing, Cambridge Elements in Publishing and Book Culture, CUP, 2021, £9.99 paperback, 978-1-108-81335-8