Then, in 1977, the author Michael Holroyd handed Ms. Callil a copy of “Frost in May” (1933), an autobiographical novel by Antonia White. Its heroine was a spirited 9-year-old trapped in a repressive convent school, and her experience spoke to Ms. Callil, who had suffered a similar upbringing. It was her story, Ms. Callil declared in an article in The Guardian in 2008, adding, “I had to republish it.”
Ms. Callil created the Virago Modern Classics imprint to exhume work like Ms. White’s and to broaden the reach of the new company. Inspired by the Penguin Classics series, she gave the imprint a visual identity: a green cover — a gender-free hue, unlike pink or blue — that she envisioned “on all the bookshelves of the world.”
The next year, Virago published five Modern Classics, and it would go on to publish hundreds more, by authors including Molly Keane, Margaret Atwood, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty. And as she predicted, that green spine would become ubiquitous in certain circles, a signifier of a particular literary taste and sensibility.
Men stacked Virago Modern Classics by their beds to impress dates with their discernment and enlightened ways, Ms. Goodings recalled in her 2020 memoir, “A Bite of the Apple: A Life With Books, Writers and Virago.”
Contemporary authors would suggest their out-of-print or forgotten favorites, and then write the introduction to the new edition — A.S. Byatt for Willa Cather; Anita Brookner for Margaret Kennedy; Victoria Glendinning for Vita Sackville-West. Ms. Callil described it as a literary version of the game Snakes and Ladders. Securing the rights was not always easy, and some living authors disavowed the mission: “I like men, you know,” was a phrase Ms. Callil heard way too often.
In 2008, Ms. Callil, by then heralded as a publishing superstar, gave a talk to a literary organization, after which, she said, “a clutch of women, gray-haired like me, came up and one by one said, ‘Thank you so much.’”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
