Virago

Virago grew out of the same London circle that produced the magazine Spare Rib. Carmen Callil, an Australian-born publisher, started it with Marsha Rowe and Rosie Boycott, first under the name Spare Rib Books. She renamed it after finding the word virago in a thesaurus, and liked its sting: a strong, outspoken woman. The company was officially registered in 1973, and Callil's own publicity firm paid for the early years. Ursula Owen and Harriet Spicer joined in 1974; Alexandra Pringle and Lennie Goodings later became directors alongside Callil.

Ownership has changed several times. Virago was bought by the Chatto, Bodley Head and Cape group in 1982, then taken back in a management buy-out in 1987. It was sold to Little, Brown in the mid-1990s and today sits within Little, Brown Book Group, part of Hachette. Goodings, long its publisher, became chair in 2017, with Sarah Savitt as publisher.

The list has two halves. New writing by women, fiction and nonfiction with a feminist outlook, runs alongside the Virago Modern Classics, launched in 1978 with a reissue of Antonia White's convent-school novel Frost in May, first published in 1933. The series went on to bring back Vera Brittain, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton and Rebecca West, among others. Over the years the house has also published Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou, Angela Carter and Daphne du Maurier.

Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle sits in that classics tradition. Virago issued it in the Modern Classics series in 1996. It is a novel about a young woman writing her journal about the daily life of a family in a crumbling English castle, and it suits a series built on bringing well-loved older fiction back into print.

Expect books chosen for their writing and for who is at the centre of them. Women are the narrators, subjects and arguments here. The Virago archive is held at the University of Reading, and Goodings tells the story of the press in her memoir A Bite of the Apple, a nod to the apple with a bite taken out of it that Callil devised as the logo.