women's presses | Thornfield Hall

“It is at this point a political action to tell it like it is, to say what I really believe about my life instead of what I’ve always been told to say.” – “The Personal Is Political,” by Carol Hanisch, 1969

I do not remember how I became familiar with the saying, “The Personal Is Political.” I must have picked it up from an anthology, or perhaps from my friend’s feminist mother, a Women’s Studies professor, because Doris Lessing, my favorite writer, never used this jargon; nor was it the kind of thing we said at our short-lived (two meetings!) consciousness raising group in high school. And yet the slogan was around, as was “Tell it like it is.”

I have always admired the alliterative quality of “The Personal Is the Political,” a radical saying coined in the 1960s . The sound and meter are not to be underestimated. I would not mind having it on a button (though it would be a crowded button).

Women were speaking out in the ‘60s and ‘70s, “telling it like it is,” lobbying for legal abortion, free day-care, and equal pay for equal work, only one of which demands was ever met, legalized abortion, but now that has been taken away, too. So telling it like it is and The Personal Is Political were powerful ideas but do we dare talk about them nowadays? It’s a bit awkward in a red state.

Still, the feminists made strides in the twentieth century. One of the most important offshoots of the Second Wave was the founding of women’s presses and publishing companies. In 1970 in New York The Feminist Press was established. It began by reprinting neglected women’s classics like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills, Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy (SF), and Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio. Nowadays The Feminist Press has expanded its list to publish Barbara Ehrenreich and other non-fiction, as well the entertaining Femmes Fatales series, which includes pulp classics like Laura, Stella Dallas, and Now, Voyager.

The Feminist Press had a leftist political agenda, so it cannot quite be compared to the women’s presses that sprang up in the UK. Still, something was simmering in England, too. The writer Carmen Calil founded Virago in 1970, and soon began to publish neglected women’s classics. And much later, in 1999, a rival women’s press, Persephone, dedicated mostly to publishing interwar women’s books, was founded by Nicola Beauman.

I’ve never heard of “Winged Seeds” (this is aomeone else’s collectiion)

Virago has the more “intellectual” list of the two British women’s presses. Several of the books in the Virago Modern Classics series are really, truly classics (Mrs. Oliphant’s absorbing Chronicles of Carlingford, Elizabeth Taylor’s beautifully-written novels and short stories), while others were published because of their historical significance (Storm Jameson’s intelligent novels. Vera Brittain’s political novels), still others capture the zeitgeist of the ’60s (Nell Nunn’s Poor Cow, Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado). On this impressive list, you will also find titles by Molly Keane (M. J. Farrell), Barbara Comyns, Pamela Frankau, Rebecca West, Penelope Mortimer, Dorothy Baker, Kay Boyle, and Stevie Smith. Over the years I have read but then prudently weeded several Viragos, not without regret.

And then there is Persephone, founded in 1999, not a direct descendant of Second Wave feminism, or not that I know of. I am less familiar with Persephone, but its charming interwar women’s novels strike me as “cozier” than Viragos and Feminist Press titles.

Nicola Beauman, the founder, is a literary scholar of interwar fiction, and her company in the early years seemed to have a brilliant marketing strategy: it appealed to women’s nostalgia by publishing adult books by the writers of children’s classic, two by Frances Hodgson Burnett, one by Noel Streatfeild, and one by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. And then loyal customers bought her more literary novels. I was won over by two novels by Monica Dickens, one of my favorite writers, especially The Winds of Heaven, a classic about the fate of an older woman. (A. S. Byatt wrote the introduction, or perhaps it was an afterword.) And it was a stroke of genius to reprint the once popular Dorothy Whipple, whose character-driven novels reflect deep insights into marriage, women’s wounded psyches, and the terrifying meaning of a dysfunctional family.

Persephone’s publication of Dorothy Whipple represents the difference between Persephone and Virago, or so Carmn Calil told the Guardian. She said that Virago never crossed “the Whipple line,” implying that Whipple was an inferior writer. And much as I enjoyed my recent reading of a novel by Dorothy Whipple, I do understand the concept of “the line.” Yet Virago and Persephone often overlap, both publishing books by Penelope Mortimer and Rachel Ferguson, for instance. And in recent years Virago has indeed crossed some kind of line by publishing Angela Thirkell’s light, humorous Barsetshire series.

It is a rich age for women’s publishing. I can lose myself in modern feminist theory or Stella Dallas from the Femmes Fatales series from the Feminist Press, a Virago edition of a favorite novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner. or an intelligent, entertaining novel by Dorothy Whipple (Persephone), whom, by the way, I read with enthusiasm.

Women’s best-sellers were wildly uneven in the 20th century. There was Looking for Mr. Goodbar, a novel about a one-night stand that ends brutally; Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, the famous novel that spawned the phrase “the zipless fuck”; and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room, which explores the effect of the Women’s Movement on an older married woman who returns to college and her fellow students.

But as far as I was concerned, only a bubblehead would want to be a prom queen, so why would anyone want to read Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen?

Then years later, I learned that two of my friends had been prom queens. They were smart, wonderful people… I suppose whatever they did was all right … but why would they participate in such sexist rites?

Everything was chaotic and characterized by rapid change in the late 20th century. Your friend could be a prom queen one decade, the editor of a scholarly journal the next, and then a radical who organized a women’s health clinic.

Women were hardly a silent majority – they were vocal – but women’s literature was not read seriously at American universities until the 1960s and ’70s, when the spread of Second Wave feminism led to the grudging hiring of women professors in male-dominated humanities departments. The canon expanded to include women, among them Virginia Woolf, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jean Rhys, Nora Zeale Hurston, and Toni Morrison. Quite seriously, there were no women writers taught in the 20th-century literature classes when I first began at the university.

What did it mean to be a feminist at that time? Well, we didn’t have many role models. One of the most influential women in my life was Carol, a friend’s mother who was a graduate student and T.A. in American Studies, and then became a professor. Occasionally my friend passed on advice from Carol, especially when I was in a dicey living situation with my mostly absent dad. Carol urged me to move with her family to the city where she had been offered a teaching job. I did not go, but I probably should have! Anyway, I am grateful for Carol’s kindness, for being invited to gourmet dinners, and for her husband’s gentle humor.

And then there were the radical politics: when she and her husband hosted NUC meetings in their living room, my friend and I couldn’t help but overhear juicy tidbits on anarchy, collective living, nonmonagamy, and university politics.

And I must add that Carol’s bookshelves were equally important to me: I borrowed The Golden Notebook, The Feminine Mystique, a historical novel about Disraeli, and many, many others.

One wonders: with all my feminism and consciousness of women writers, why did I go into classics? It’s because I’m a language nerd, of course. But in my classical studies, there were no women writers except Sappho and Sulpicia, and only two women professors per department (at the universities where I studied anyway).

Afterwards, during my years as a cranky private school teacher, I rejuvenated myself on weekends by devouring women’s literature. I read my way through Colette, Elizabeth Bowen, Margaret Drabble, Margaret Laurence, Bobbie Ann Mason, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Tallent, and Elizabeth Taylor. Were they in the canon? Well, I was on my own, and they were in my canon.

What do bookish spinsters do with their free time? Well, before I got married, I volunteered at a women’s bookstore. I had always wanted to be a bookseller, but I must admit it was dull. Scarcely anyone came in, and hardly anyone bought anything. In fact, I was reminded of Linda Radlett’s stint at the communist bookstore in Nancy Mitford’s comic novel, The Pursuit of Love: no one bought anything until Linda substituted best-sellers for the communist pamphlets. And then her friends came and chatted. Finally the store made money!

Well, like Linda, I did have a male friend who came in to chat: he recommended several women science fiction writers, among them C.L. Moore and Joanna Russ. The store didn’t stock them, but he was ahead of his time. Joanna Russ’s books are considered classics now, and C. L. Moore was one of the first women who wrote SF.

It was also at the boring women’s bookstore that I became familiar with small presses. We stocked several titles by the Feminist Press, which was founded in 1973, including Zora Hurston Neale’s I Love Myself When I Am Laughing… , Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland.

And then there were Viragos, a press founded in 1970, which popped up in the U.S. in the ’80s .The American editions, published by Dial Press, had black covers instead of green, but were equally attractive.

And the green British Viragos began to crop up at used bookstores: I probably own fifty Viragos, but there are hundreds!

I must admit, Virago is my favorite small press, but I am also a fan of Persephone, founded by Nicola Beauman in 1999. Persephone specializes in middlebrow interwar fiction, and I love Rachel Ferguson, Dorothy Whipple, and Monica Dickens.

There may have been rivalry between Virago and Persephone: years ago in The Guardian, some Virago associate said sneeringly that Viragos never went below “the Whipple line.” We all love Dorothy Whipple, and we’re grateful to Beauman for crossing the line.

And now I must mention a phenomenon unique to our century: two men have become publishers and/or editors of middlebrow women’s fiction presses. These well-known bloggers, Furrowed Middlebrow and Stuck in a Book, are both experts in middlebrow women’s fiction, and have found a niche in publishing. The Furrowed Middlebrow imprint publishes light novels by D. E. Stevenson and Stella Gibbons but also neglected classics by Doris Langley Moore and Rachel Ferguson. Simon at Stuck in a Book is editor of the British Library Women Writers Series. He has published my favorite novel by Rose Macaulay, Dangerous Ages, Penelope Mortimer’s Home (a brilliant novel!), and has reissued one of my favorite Viragos, E. H. Young’s Chatterton Square.

Both the Furrowed Middlebrow and the British Library Women Writers series are excellent, and I don’t want you to think I am in any way critical. But I have an awkward question to ask. Where are all the women? Why don’t they have the spunk to start their own imprints or publishing companies?

Really, ladies, put your backs into it! I’m saying this for your own good. You’ll regret it if you don’t take a chance.

In the meantime, kudos to Furrowed Middlebrow and Stuck in a Book!