The idea for the feminist publishing company Virago came to Carmen Callil, who has died aged 84, “like the switching on of a lightbulb”. Since the revelation occurred during drinks to mark the first issue of the feminist magazine Spare Rib in 1972, her first inclination was to call it Spare Rib Books. Then she and the journalist Rosie Boycott chanced on the word virago – a heroic, warlike woman – in a book about goddesses. The resulting venture radically expanded the published range of writing by women and transformed the role of women in publishing itself.
Virago aimed to provide a mass-market publisher for 52% of the population – women – at a time when they were permitted neither mortgages nor bank loans. Marsha Rowe, a co-founder of Spare Rib, had explained the ideas of the “very serious American feminists” of the 60s to Callil, the magazine’s publicist, whose own feminism had been learned at her mother’s knee. “I never had any time for the bra-burning Daily Mail nonsense because it didn’t include men … The number of men who helped me get Virago off the ground is legion.”
An advisory group of 28 women – friends, journalists, academics – offered money and food as well as advice. As word spread, women surged up the stairs to Callil’s attic in Chelsea, south-west London, offering ideas and manuscripts – “I got tired of hearing about the vagina.” Most asked: “Can I help?” Many did, among them Anna Coote, who brought in Virago’s first author, Mary Chamberlain, whose Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village was published in association with Quartet in 1973.
The following year, Virago became self-financing and independent, with capital of £1,500 and a guaranteed overdraft of £25,000 plus a loan of £10,000. Rowe and Boycott left and Ursula Owen – a psychiatric social worker, one of many early volunteers – became editorial director. Harriet Spicer, who had worked as a publicist with Callil, came aboard to handle production.
Callil attempted to balance the demands of Virago with those of her publicity company in order to meet the bills. Authors helped: Angela Carter wrote The Sadeian Woman for only £25. Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, first published in 1933, was revived in 1978 and the following year became a five-part BBC TV series.
Each dark green volume carried on its second page the declaration that “Virago is a feminist publishing company”, followed by a quotation from Sheila Rowbotham’s Women, Resistance and Revolution: “It is only when women start to organise in large numbers that we become a political force, and begin to move towards the possibility of a truly democratic society.”
At the author Michael Holroyd’s suggestion, Callil read Antonia White’s Frost in May and, determined to publish it, in 1978 invented a series of Virago Modern Classics (VMC) to challenge Penguin’s then predominantly male line. “If founding Virago was my first lightbulb moment, dreaming up Classics was my second,” Callil reflected years later, of the series now as revered and recognisable as any in publishing.
Almost overnight, a brand had been created from nothing. Never mind that Anthony Burgess, welcoming the VMC revival of Dorothy Richardson’s four-volume Pilgrimage, regretted that it was reissued by “chauvinist sows” – teachers, WI members, radical feminists, even men welcomed Virago, which Callil had started because she wanted to demonstrate that “women had a history of their own”.
In 1982, Callil was headhunted to take over at Chatto & Windus. She accepted on condition that Virago come with her, believing that to survive it had to be part of a larger group – Chatto, Cape and Bodley Head as it then was. The decision caused rancour but met with success, Callil looking after VMC while splashing out a reported £625,000 on Holroyd’s biography of George Bernard Shaw.
But Virago lost profitability as part of a bigger group (“companies badly run by men”, Callil said) which by 1987 was owned by Random House USA. Callil, Owen, Spicer, Lennie Goodings and Alexandra Pringle bought the firm out, but by 1995, with the book trade threatened on various fronts, it was clear that Virago could no longer stand alone. Callil stood down as chairman, and rescue came in the form of Little, Brown, where it continues to flourish, though that company in turn became part of the multinational Hachette Group.
Callil could be guilty of appalling behaviour that she justified by claiming that she was battling against the odds. Those who worked with her remember lots of crying in the toilets. “I cried in the toilets, too – we all did,” Callil said, in the BBC Four documentary Virago: Changing the World One Page at a Time (2016). “I’d ask people: ‘What the fuck are you doing?’” but she claimed colleagues were free to tell her to fuck off in return.
She loved animals; a request for time off work to grieve for a pet would be met with understanding, and on holiday in France in the days before pet passports she once admitted to having spent an hour on the phone to her dog. To close friends, she was always loyal.
Born in Melbourne, Victoria, Carmen was the third of four children. The family of her mother, Lorraine (nee Allen), had arrived from Cork in the late 1800s, fleeing the enclosure acts, and that of her father, Frederick Callil, from Lebanon following the massacres of Maronite Christians. A barrister, assistant lecturer in French at Melbourne University and an opera-lover, he named his daughter after Bizet’s feisty heroine. She explored her family’s origins in depth in Oh Happy Day (2020).
Carmen was eight when her father died: during his long illness she had been sent to a convent boarding school. She was “miserable and lonely”, the nuns sapping all the joy from life and instilling in young minds a fear of sin and hell. Even in adult life, Callil felt that “God is after me with a scythe” should she disagree with him. She could detect no interest in intellectual achievement, the educational emphasis on being a lady. “I can think of no worse way of passing your life – a frightful waste.” When, years later, she read Frost in May, she related immediately to the story of a nine-year-old closeted in a convent.
At Melbourne University she studied English literature and Australian history. Learning for the first time about the cruelty meted out to early settlers she wept, becoming forever “a political animal”. Almost immediately on graduation, she set sail for Europe, having “a wonderful time in Italy”. In 1960, she arrived in Britain.
The ensuing decade in London was, as the title of Sarah Maitland’s memoir published by Virago in 1988 put it, Very Heaven. Jobs were easy to come by and soon Callil was working in publishing, one of an army of young female publicists.
For Callil, as for many of her generation, 1968 was a political turning point. Then there was the underground press, International Times and Oz, whose publishers Richard Neville and Felix Dennis launched the newspaper Ink as a bridge to the national press. Callil volunteered to handle publicity – “the best thing about it”. Neville and Dennis were distracted by the Oz obscenity trial of 1971 and imprisoned until their appeals were successful. When Ink folded, Rowe, Boycott and Callil embarked on Spare Rib, and Callil founded her book publicity company as well as Virago Press.
After she retired from publishing, Callil contributed reviews and features to newspapers and magazines, and divided her time between London and France. She appeared occasionally on TV and radio, judged awards (resigning from the jury of the Man Booker International in 2011 over the decision to award the prize to Philip Roth), gave some lectures and, in 2006, produced a book of her own. Bad Faith was a well-received biography of Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, until then a mere footnote in French second world war history.
A brush with lung cancer concentrated her mind and she organised her archives for the British Library. In the wake of the EU referendum of 2016 she founded 48% & Rising, campaigning energetically for the remain cause, and she also lent her support to the Writers Rebel group backing Extinction Rebellion, and Artists for Palestine UK.
There were various honours, including the distinguished writing award from the International Women’s Writing Guild, and honorary doctorates from Sheffield, York, Oxford Brookes and the Open University. In the 2017 birthday honours, Callil was made a dame for services to literature.
“I always wanted to change the world,” Callil once said. “It simply wasn’t good enough.”
She is survived by her brother Julian. Another brother and a sister predeceased her.
• Carmen Thérèse Callil, publisher and author, born 15 July 1938; died 17 October 2022
