'Gendered reading is making a judgement,' she writes, 'assuming this novel is going to be about things of interest to women only.' Later: 'We are saying there is no such thing as a limiting female experience and nor is there a male universal one.

I found the last chapters in particular invigorating, as Goodings defends the existence of a press devoted to women's writing. The writing is mostly workmanlike, but the story of Virago Press remains worth your time and attention. This book is about how it felt to be there.Ī Bite of the Apple is a celebration of writing, of publishing, and of reading. Virago lives within the tension between idealism and pragmatism between sisterhood and celebrity between watching feminism wax and wane at the same time as knowing so many of the battles are still to be won. Following the chronology of the press and the enormous breadth of the Virago titles published over these years, she sets her story in the context of feminism, and segues into thoughts on editing, post-feminism, reading, breaking boundaries, and the Virago Modern Classics.

Virago has been a life-changer for Lennie Goodings - but certainly not only for her.

First a publicist and then for over twenty years, publisher and editor, she has worked with extraordinary authors: Margaret Atwood, Marilynne Robinson, Sarah Waters, Linda Grant, Natasha Walter, Naomi Wolf and Maya Angelou among many others. Lennie Goodings has been with the iconic press founded by Carmen Callil almost since the start. This is the story of how the authors and staff who, driven by passion, conviction and excitement, have made Virago Press one of the most important and influential English-language publishers in the world.

'Ī Bite of the Apple is part-memoir, part history of Virago, and part thoughts on over forty years of feminist publishing. I certainly wouldn't have had the brazen hope then-only twenty-five and very recently new to Britain-that I would ever become the Publisher, but I did know that I had found my home: where books, ideas, politics, imagination, feminism, and business was the air we breathed. 'The moment I got my job at Virago in 1978 I knew it would be a long time before I would leave.

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