Callil, Spicer and Owen used their mortgages as collateral to finance Virago, along with a small but constant running overdraft of Callil’s bank account. Rowe and Boycott ultimately moved on, and Callil was joined by Harriet Spicer Ursula Owen, who added intellectual and feminist heft to the endeavour, according to Callil, whose own tastes were more purely literary Alexandra Pringle, who would go on to be editor-in-chief of Bloomsbury Publishing and Lennie Goodings, who many years later would run Virago. Among them was Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, a compendium of women’s sexual fantasies that was already a bestseller in United States Virago’s proofreader, alarmed by its contents, scrawled a protest in the margins of : “I can’t bear to read any more of this!” At a news conference held that year, one male journalist asked how, going forward, they could possibly find more works of woman authorship to publish. Virago’s first book was Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village (1975), a social history by Mary Chamberlain about impoverished women in a remote town. “It is an unlovely and aggressive name,” author Anthony Burgess famously sneered in The Observer in 1979, “even for a militant feminist organisation.”īut hundreds of women - and some men, among them future Knopf publisher Sonny Mehta - were eager to lend a hand to the venture with contacts, introductions, financing and design advice. Boycott chose the name - a virago is defined both as a strong, heroic woman and as a harpy - and it fit the mission, and perhaps also Callil’s persona. It was 1973 and she had been helping to publicise Adam’s Rib, a feminist magazine started by two journalists, Marsha Rowe, who like her was Australian-born, and Rosie Boycott, when one night in a pub she had what she called a “lightbulb” moment and decided to form a mainstream company that would publish books by and for women.
Virago began in Callil’s apartment, an attic bedsit off the King’s Road. Rosie Boycott chose the name - a virago is defined both as a strong, heroic woman and as a harpy - and it fit the mission, and perhaps also Callil’s persona
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