Virago

About Virago

Virago is a British publisher of books by women, set up in London in the early 1970s by Carmen Callil with Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe, and it is now an imprint of the Little, Brown Book Group within Hachette UK.

The company began in July 1972 as Spare Rib Books, named after the feminist magazine, and was renamed Virago by the end of that year; it was formally listed as a publishing company in June 1973 and worked at first from Callil's house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea. Its first book was Mary Chamberlain's Fenwomen (1975), issued in association with Quartet, and its first fully independent title followed in 1977. In May 1978 Virago launched the Virago Modern Classics with Antonia White's Frost in May, a list that brought neglected twentieth-century women writers back into print. Authors associated with the house include Angela Carter, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker and Vera Brittain, whose Testament of Youth Virago reissued in 1978.

In 1982 Virago became a subsidiary of the Chatto, Virago, Bodley Head and Cape group. Its directors bought the company back in a management buy-out in 1987, and in 1996 it was sold to Little, Brown, which itself became part of Hachette Livre in 2006. Lennie Goodings became its publisher at the time of the 1996 sale.