Lennie Goodings on where feminism and publishing intersect

by Laure Baudot

A Bite of the Apple, Lennie Goodings’ impassioned memoir about her years of working at Virago, one of Britain’s first Feminist publishing houses, was published earlier this year by Oxford University Press in the UK and by Biblioasis this month. Goodings, who was, at various times, publicist, editor, eventually chief publisher, and now Chair of Virago, chronicles the publishing house’s journey, from its origins in 1973 to its place today as an imprint of Little, Brown. Goodings was made an honorary patron of the Carol Shields Prize this month.

Although A Bite of the Apple fits into the publishing memoir genre, it is a hybrid book that goes beyond Goodings’ personal story: it is also an analysis of the women’s movement and the publishing industry, underpinned by Goodings’ narrative of her life-long love affair with books. The memoir entertains, for Goodings couples her careful observations with drily funny anecdotes about Virago’s authors including Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou, Sarah Dunant, Marilynne Robinson, Sarah Waters and Angela Carter.

Goodings’ book is a history of feminism from the 1970s onward, and the centrality of women’s writing within it. Carmen Calill founded the press with the political and philosophical mission of championing women’s writing, and Goodings reiterates the importance of creating a platform for women’s voices.

From the start, Virago’s philosophy has been to bring as many stories as possible into the mainstream. Writes Goodings, “[We had] the desire to inspire and educate and entertain all women, and men too….” Goodings is honest, however, about some of Virago’s early failings in inclusivity in their publications. She talks about the extraordinarily important and first International Feminist book fair in 1984, organized by feminist presses, authors and booksellers, but how they failed to include many women of colour on the organizing committee.

Toward the end of the book, Goodings tells us that many ask, “‘Is Virago still necessary?’” Quoting Adrienne Rich, she writes: “‘In a world where language and naming are power…We need concrete artifacts, the work of hands, written words to read, images to look at, a dialogue with brave and imaginative women who came before us.’” In Goodings’ book, we have such an artifact.

Thank you for writing this deeply personal, informative and passionate book. In the 1970s and 80s, my very liberal parents gave me books by women, and your book reminds me that not everyone shares that privilege – that getting books into the hands of readers is neither a given nor an easy task. What prompted you to write this book, and why now?

I sat beside a publisher at an event, and we got to talking about publishing…. I said what I find so exciting about publishing is the tension between commerce and art. I love the feeling that you can infiltrate and win with politics in the mainstream arena. That you can make ideas and literature part of the mainstream. That’s what Virago’s always been about: publishing from the margins but never seeing ourselves as marginal. She said, why don’t you write a book about that? And I thought, I’m not writing a book about that. For about two years every time she saw me she would say, are you sure? I [thought to myself], nobody else is asking you to write a book. It’s a great privilege to be commissioned. And I thought I do have something to say. So I started.

You write about the problem of pigeonholing certain books into what Susan Sontag calls “testaments of experience”. Is there such thing as aesthetics, and what do you do with a poorly-written book that tells an important story?

I felt suspicious of Susan Sontag’s testaments of experience and so did Grace Paley. What we thought she was slightly alluding to was new voices. She [Sontag] had that slightly old-fashioned idea that there is `great’ literature, and I thought her idea of testimony of experience, that was saying, yeah, I can see you have something to say but too bad you can’t say it very well. But you can help people make the best writing. I published a writer named Waris Dirie who was one of the first women to speak up against what was then called Female Circumcision (Female Genital Mutilation). It came to me with a ghost writer and we worked on it together. I thought, this isn’t high art but that doesn’t matter. The story is what matters. Having said that, the quality of writing in Virago books is one of the things we most cherish.

You write briefly about the importance of fiction prizes in bringing marginal voices to the centre. Is there still a need for these prizes today?

Prizes are still the best way to judge literature. Prize winners are what a society deems great. And I think that literature is the best way to judge our society still. And so, I think that prizes are very important. The question then around prizes is who decides what is great, which is the meta-message around Virago in the full sense: who gets to decide what is great, who gets to tell the stories? There’s a need for women’s prizes still. If we pretend that prizes are gender blind, or racially blind, we mask a greater issue of what’s going on in society. [Literary prizes] not only call attention to what is deemed to be great and who decides, but they provoke conversations about it, and that is the real value of these prizes: the conversation around them.

In terms of Feminism, what are the gains we’ve made and what are some of the losses?

We have at least gained the almost universal idea that women should be equally educated, equally paid, and be free of violence. In most societies – not all – that is an acceptance now. I know young people are very frustrated because we haven’t gone very far but when I started in publishing in the late 70s and early 80s, those were not givens. We could not be certain that most people held those views. Those are huge gains it seems to me. What have we lost? That’s a good question.

Lennie Goodings and Margaret Atwood, both of whom are literary patrons of The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.

I was thinking of my experience as a young adult in the late 80s and early 90s, when I was reading both Francophone and Anglophone writers. At the time I felt that the discussion of pleasure was missing from Anglophone Feminism. Can you talk about the relationship between Feminism and pleasure, and the role of a publisher like Virago in publishing books about pleasure, which some critics might see as anti-feminist?

Feminism – sometimes our differences of opinion have been pretty grim. Women – people – have always fought when they cared deeply about something. It’s so important though to also make sure we’re listening to each other. But the passion naturally creates tensions.

But pleasure…you’re right. The early feminist movement felt like you had to behave in a certain way. When we first started publishing we were like a bridge between mainstream and Feminism. You’d have the mainstream people being slightly horrified or titillated by you, or, with radical feminists, disparaging because we insisted on having good-looking jackets on our books, that we weren’t a co-operative, that men sold our books. So is that saying you can’t have pleasure and feminism? I don’t know. I think that’s gone away. What I love about young women is that there’s a celebration of bad-assed, honest feelings and behaviour. And the lack of discretion around particular female subjects. Young women are saying, we’re going to talk about menstruation. Instead of thinking we’ll suppress some of the biology that threatens to define us, young women are saying, to hell with you, this is how I feel, this is who I am. I also love their (correct) sense of no nonsense around fairness and equality.

Policing of the self—that has disappeared. Now we police language. We’re quick to jump on people who say things the wrong way.

The kind of public shaming we’ve seen?

Exactly. James Baldwin [writes] that, “Causes are notoriously bloodthirsty.” We don’t know what to do with dissent. And so we attack each other. I have always despaired of that.

Do you see publishing becoming increasingly commercial and, if so, how does this impact writing by women and a feminist publisher like Virago?

Publishing, like all industries, seeks to make money, [and like most is] devoted to the status quo. That’s their default position. [These days,] publishing wants to change and it talks about diverse voices. But I think publishing really only changes when social movements force change. Feminism gave birth to publishing houses like Virago. The Lesbian and Gay rights, now LGBTQ+ movements, continue to make publishers change what and who they publish and now Black Lives Matter is going to change publishing. It takes an outside force, a social movement, to force the change faster. Because social movements are ultimately readers speaking and demanding books that reflect them.

You write that autobiographies are “an edited life, and editing means leaving people and things out…and not telling every truth.” Can you talk about what you’ve held back?

(laughs) I left out a lot to do with myself, my personal self. It’s a work memoir. I’m not hiding that I have children and that I was breastfeeding when I went to the Booker and things like that, but I haven’t led on that. I’ve led on the pains and pleasures of work.