MIXED MEDIA: FEMINIST PRESSES AND PUBLISHING POLITICS IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN SIMONE ELIZABETH MURRAY DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON 1999 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author U,Ip 1 Still, Madam, the private printing press is an actual fact, and not beyond the reach of a moderate income. Typewriters and duplicators are actual facts and even cheaper. By using these cheap and so far unforbidden instruments you can at once rid yourself of the pressure of boards, policies and editors. They will speak your own mind, in your own words, at your own time, at your own length, at your own bidding. And that, we are agreed, is our definition of 'intellectual liberty'. - Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) 2 Image removed due to third party copyright ABSTRACT The high cultural profile of contemporary feminist publishing in Britain has previously met with a curiously evasive response from those spheres of academic discourse in which it might be expected to figure: women's studies, while asserting the innate politicality of all communication, has tended to overlook the subject of publishing in favour of less materialist cultural modes; while publishing studies has conventionally overlooked the significance of gender as a differential in analysing print media. Siting itself at this largely unexplored academic juncture, the thesis analyses the complex interaction of feminist politics and fiction publishing in twentieth-century Britain. Chapter 1 -" 'Books With Bite': Virago Press and the Politics of Feminist Conversion" - focuses on Britain's oldest extant women's publishing venture, Virago Press, and analyses the organisational structures and innovative marketing strategies which engineered the success of its reprint and original fiction lists. Chapter 2 looks back to Elizabeth Corbet Yeats's early-twentieth-century Cuala Press, a prominent element in the Irish literary revival and debates around women's relationship to nationalist agendas. The experience of The Women's Press, Black Woman Talk and Sheba Feminist Publishers constitutes the crux of Chapter 3 - " 'Books of Integrity': Dilemmas of Race and Authenticity in Feminist Publishing" - which reads these presses as challenges to the early-second-wave women's movement insistence on the primacy of sisterhood for women's identity politics. Chapter 4 investigates feminist publishing's historical involvement in Edwardian suffrage politics and the vexed role of men within feminist publishing enterprises. Radical feminist and lesbian publishing is scrutinised in Chapter 5- "Collective Unconscious: The Demise of Radical Feminist Publishing" - which centres upon Onlywomen Press, Sheba and Silver Moon Books, and explores the problematic nature of the collective principle for women's media enterprises. The concluding chapter - "This Book Could Change Your Life': Feminist Bestsellers and the Power of Mainstream Publishing" - assesses the impact of feminism on mainstream post-war publishing. It critiques the ways in which mainstream houses' commissioning, design and marketing of canonical feminist texts have frequently militated against their oppositional content. Central to the analysis as a whole is the dynamic tension arising from the conjunction of radical politics and the commercial market-place, a relationship in which the contesting exigencies of political progressiveness and business solvency create an energising - though volatile - dialectic. for Helen whose this both is, and is not CONTENTS Introduction 9 Chapter 1 Books With Bite: Virago Press and the Politics of Feminist Conversion 45 Chapter 2 Work for Irish Hands in the Making of Beautiful Things: The Cuala Press and Confficts of Cultural Nationalism 90 Chapter 3 Books of Integrity: Dilemmas of Race and Authenticity in Feminist Publishing 130 Chapter 4 Deeds and Words: The Woman's Press and the Politics of Print in the Edwardian Suffrage Movement 169 Chapter 5 Collective Unconscious: The Demise of Radical Feminist Publishing 210 Chapter 6 This Book Could Change Your Lifr: Feminist Bestsellers and the Power of Mainstream Publishing 259 Afterword Feminist Publishing: A Twentieth-Century Phenomenon? 322 Illustrations 330 Bibliography 347 7 ILLUSTRATIONS [page 41 Cartoon on the November 1995 sale of Virago Press to Little, Brown UK (Australian Financial Review 8 Nov. 1995: 5). [page 330] Robert Darnton's model of "The Communications Circuit" from "What Is the History of Books?" (1990, [1982]). [page 331] A book illustrative of Virago's early Reprint Library series and its interest in 'lost' histories - Margaret Liewelyn Davies, ed., Life As We Have Known it (1977, [1931]). [page 332] The first of the Virago Modem Classics, Antonia White's Frost in May (1978, [1933]), packaged in the series' distinctive cover design: bottle green background, apple logo, and a painting by a lesser-known artist. [page 333] Eve's bite: Virago's high-profile June 1997 relaunch insert in the Guardian. Its title (a borrowing from Angela Carter) invokes the imprint's literary reputation, while the 'bad girl' imagery attempts to attract a new, under-30s readership. [page 334] The 1997 free fiction sampler showcasing Senior Editor Sally Abbey's list innovation: the Virago Vs. The apple green signals abandonment of the Classics' standard cover design, while the apple remains - albeit in made-over fashion. [page 335] Elizabeth Corbet Yeats operating the Albion hand-press at Dun Emer/Cuala in 1903, while work-girls ink blocks and correct proofs. [page 336] The Women's Press 1983 film tie-in edition of Alice Walker's bestseller Th Color Purpk, with striped spine, steam iron logo and film poster graphics. The title's key marketing feature - Steven Spielberg's film - is announced in letters as large as those spelling out the author's name. [page 337] The cover of The Women's Press's 20th anniversary catalogue (1998) showing its tongue-in-cheek steam iron logo in monumental mode. [page 338] The Women's Press's 1998 "top twenty" backlist promotion, with bestseller The Color Purple (1983) by Alice Walker strategically positioned in first place. [page 339] A feature article from Votes for Women (15 Sep. 1911) depicting the Woman's Press premises at 156 Charing Cross Road. The much remarked upon clock features in the photograph at top left. [page 340] Cover design for Anna Livia's Incidents Involving Warmth (1986) depicting an early Onlywomen logo subsequently rejected as too racially specific. [page 341] Abacus's "hideous" political rosettes cover for the 1972 UK paperback edition of Kate Millett's Sexual Politics [1970]. [page 342] British artist John Holmes's original cover design for Greer's The Female Eunuch - rejected by Paladin and unmistakably modelled on Greer herself (Callil, 1995: 8). [page 343] Holmes's second attempt - the now iconic design for Paladin's 197lpaperback edition of Greer's bestselling title, here rejigged for Flamingo/HarperCollins' 21st anniversary edition (1993). [page 344] Hamlyn's deceptive cross-genre marketing of Susie Orbach's Fat is a Feminist Issue. (1979, [1978]) as "the book that begins the diet revolution". [page 345] The successful Vintage paperback design for Naomi Wolf's The Beauty yj] (1991, [1990]), utilising Clare Park's evocative black and white photograph. [page 346] Random House's second design for Wolf's Promiscuities (1998, [1997]) - part Lolita, part callow adolescent. INTRODUCTION I should begin by declaring, not an interest, but a lack of initial interest in another sense: a feminist publishing house is not a cause to which my heart responds. There are surety few occupations which can claim to need a sexist back-up less than novel writing? It is almost the only respected, paying art at which women have been busy nearly as long as men and with a comparable degree of success. Nor, contrary to a widespread modern myth about the Awful Lives of women in the past, did they once have to be George Eliots to get away with it. In our own century the numbers of successful women writers (successful in the sense of being published, read, enjoyed, remembered, not necessarily well-paid of course) must be equal, or nearly so, to the numbers on the male side. Neither young nor old nor women nor men nor homosexuals should, if they are good at writing, need to occupy a professional reservation as if they were an endangered species. (Tindall, 1979: 144) How green were our bookshelves, how black and white our lives, those long-gone days when sisterhood was global and every remotely right- on household sported the distinctive spines of Virago and The Women's Press. Once those bottle green and striped covers were a passport to the front lines. Now you might well find your favourite feminist author on the Penguin shelf, and grab your next blockbuster from the railway Virago stand. In a word, feminist publishing has succeeded. (Briscoe, 1990b: 43) In the ideological and temporal distance which separates these two statements it is possible to trace the outlines of the most significant development in late-twentieth- century British publishing: the emergence and infiltration into the cultural mainstream of feminist presses. Gillian Tindall's observations, extracted from a 1979 New Society review of Virago Press's fiction list, query the very raison d'être of a feminist publishing house, reading the past success of individual female novelists as evidence of a publishing industry gender-neutral