Enterprising women: independence, finance and Virago Press, c.1976-1993

Virago Press were established in 1972 and became one of the twentieth century’s most enduring publishing brands. As a women-led enterprise, articulations of independence have defined key moments in Virago’s history. This article explores two moments when the company re-structured as independent, in 1976 and 1987. To become successful, Virago had to overcome barriers that have historically hindered women’s participation in business, namely limited social capital and difficulties accessing finance. Virago founder Carmen Callil’s friendships with publisher Paul Hamlyn and printing entrepreneur Robert Gavron embedded Virago in networks of male entrepreneurial knowledge that helped shape the evolution of the company. Such networks were vital to Virago securing investment from Rothschilds Ventures Limited in 1987 who were, at that time, leading figures in the UK’s growing private equity industry. This article contributes to growing historical understanding of the synergies between financial, arts and culture industries in the 80s. It argues that while this era offered new opportunities for women to participate in business, such participation was tempered by new forms of legal and financial discipline that re-calibrated existing gender inequalities within business cultures. Due to the time periods under consideration, this article also analyses how entrepreneurial practices and opportunities for women changed dramatically with the onset of Thatcher’s ‘Enterprise Culture’

Green spines, back story: delving into the early history of Virago reprints and modern classics

While the iconic green spines of Virago Modern Classics have become a fixture in the literary imagination, D-M Withers looks into the early history of feminist publisher Virago Press to explore how the decision to publish a fiction reprint list represented a significant change in the publishing strategy of a company whose main activity had been non-fiction, in new or reprint form

Generation of internal stress and its effects

Internal stresses may be generated continually in many polycrystalline materials. Their existence is manifested by changes in crystal defect concentration and arrangement, by surface observations, by macroscopic shape changes and particularly by alteration of mechanical properties when external stresses are simultaneously imposed

Honno: the Welsh women’s press and the cultural ecology of the Welsh publishing industry, c. 1950s to the present

Honno: the Welsh Women’s Press is the longest running independent publisher of books by women currently operating in the UK. This article situates Honno’s publishing activities within the ‘cultural ecology’ of the Welsh publishing industry. This unique cultural and economic infrastructure is traced back to the 1950s, when grassroots organizations such as the Books Council of Wales and state-subsidized initiatives were established to support the commercial and literary development of Welsh language publishing, and the survival of the Welsh language more broadly. In the late 1960s further support for the Welsh Book Trade came when the Welsh Arts Council was created, which facilitated the cultural development of Welsh writing in English and Welsh. Contextualizing Honno within the Welsh Publishing Industry reveals how the company has managed to survive as a small publisher focused on its original publishing mission: to promote writing by women in Wales, in English and Welsh, grounded in the history and lives of Welsh women. Honno’s history—and, more broadly, the evolution of the Welsh Publishing Industry in the post-war era—can also help disrupt totalizing narratives about the reach of capitalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It demonstrates that alternative conceptions of cultural and economic value continue to circulate, despite their apparent embeddedness within neoliberal, business and financialised orthodoxies

“I pictured you only as an adventurous explorer”: Deben Bhattacharya, Ella K. Maillart, friendship and polygraphic influence

This is the final version. Available on open access from Routledge via the DOI in this record. Ella K. Maillart (1903–97), the Swiss travel writer-adventuress, and Deben Bhattacharya (1921–2001), the Bengali field recordist and media producer, first corresponded in July 1949 and remained friends their whole lives. This article traces the evolution of their personal and professional relationship. I begin by discussing development of Bhattacharya's career in the early 1950s. I then outline how Maillart offered Bhattacharya a model for using material collected in the field to produce multiple works. Reading Maillart's work alongside Bhattacharya's, it is possible to trace affinities, and sometimes tensions, between their practices. I then turn to the many records Bhattacharya produced. Through engaging with para-texts – liner notes, maps, and photographs – and the records themselves, I suggest these works can be read as forms of popular travel literature, written in sound. Overall, this article contributes to ongoing work to establish the profile of Bhattacharya, while highlighting the cultural influence of Maillart

Playing with time: Kate Bush’s temporal strategies and resistant time consciousness

This article focuses on two of Kate Bush’s post-Aerial (2005) albums: Director’s Cut (2011) and 50 Words for Snow (2011). In these albums Bush plays with the temporal qualities of recorded music to create the conditions for self-reflexive internal time consciousness to emerge within the listener. I argue that self-reflexive internal time consciousness is a process that enables a listener to gain some understanding that they are embroiled in an act of perception forged via active engagement with recorded music. Bush creates these conditions in two principle ways: In Director’s Cut she disturbs the memory of previous recorded versions that are re-visited on the album so they can be mobilised as new, interpretative-perceptive acts. In 50 Words for Snow she uses duration as a structure to support the construction of extensive perception. Bush plays with time on these albums because her conceptual music relies upon the uninterrupted unfolding of consciousness as it becomes interlaced with her recordings, understood in the Husserlian sense of temporal objects. Implicit to her temporal strategies is a critique of contemporary listening conditions and how they undermine the very forging of the perceptual ac

Development of a risk assessment tool to assess the significance of septic tanks around freshwater SSSIs. Phase 1 – Understanding better the retention of phosphorus in the drainage fields

The findings contained within this report have allowed Natural England to refine and implement a risk assessment methodology for septic tanks, which was developed through a previous project with CEH (NECR170)