Cultural Life, Arts and Expression: Lennie Goodings

“At Virago we say the power to publish is a wonderful thing – and it is! And it is something to celebrate. But power carries responsibility: it means taking care to listen properly, to be generous with a desire to be wide-ranging in commissioning. It also requires courage because if we hold back out of fear of negative opinions, we waste our power... I remember the advice of one of Virago’s authors, Adrienne Rich, from one of her essays in On Lies, Secrets and Silence. She said: “We cannot wait to speak until we are clear and perfectly righteous”. Changing the world is a work in progress and tension – creative, bracing and challenging – is an integral, even exciting, part of change. Onward, I say!”

Lennie Goodings is Chair of Virago Press. Her authors including Margaret Atwood, Sarah Waters, Marilynne Robinson, Maya Angelou, Sarah Dunant, Sandi Toksvig, Linda Grant, Natasha Walter, Naomi Wolf – all game changers – among many other writers. Lennie is herself now writing a book, The Idealistic Publisher, while still acquiring and editing books for Virago. She is Canadian, married, the mother of two and lives in London.

She grew up in St Catharines, Ontario, the oldest of five children. After university, Lennie left Canada in 1977 when she was 24 intending to stay in London for one year... and has lived there ever since. In her youth, she tipped in a raft in the whirlpool rapids just below Niagara Falls (an event memorialised as a short story in Bluebeard’s Egg by Margaret Atwood) but since then she has behaved herself and published books.

She was part of the second generation of Viragos – joining full time in 1979, four years after it published its first book: an amazingly exciting and dynamic time in the women’s movement. She has gone through all of Virago’s rebirth and reincarnations: original independence; part of the Chatto,Virago,Cape Bodley Head Group; one of the team who did the management buy-out; and part of the Board who sold the imprint to Little,Brown in 1995. She has received an Honorary Doctorate from Queen’s University in Canada and in 2010, Lennie Goodings won Editor and Imprint of the Year at the British Book Awards.