A BITE OF THE APPLE

A LIFE WITH BOOKS, WRITERS AND VIRAGO

LENNIE GOODINGS

OUP, 320pp, £16.99

Lennie Goodings is chair of Virago Press, having first joined what was then a tiny feminist publishing house ‘to do the publicity’ in the early 1980s. Her book is part memoir, part history of Virago, part practical guide to publishing, part affectionate portraits of writers she has worked with, part a defence of the continuing need for Virago to exist at all – ‘Does any other successful publisher get asked constantly if they are still necessary?’ the author asks, with wistful good humour.

Mark Bostridge in the Spectator was struck by Goodings’s ‘impressive idealism ... about the ways in which the published word can change society and help readers to become the people they want to be’. In the

Guardian Bidisha missed the malice ‘that makes a literary memoir truly great – the touch of poison that seasons the recipe’. But the book snapped ‘into wit and colour’ when Goodings wrote about her work as an editor. Frances Wilson in Prospect honed in on Goodings’s account of the white male vicar who published a series of stories about British Asian girls under a false name in 1987 – the episode ‘proved prescient for current debates about fiction and identity politics’. Wilson noted Goodings’s argument that ‘the new hurdle is getting books by women to be read by men’ and suggested that ‘Virago continues to mirror the evolving feminist movement, and like that movement it has achieved a great deal and almost nothing at all.’ She gave the last word to Goodings: ‘Why are men tone deaf?’