Sarah Savitt's Reading List

"The personal and the political is a theme that runs through all of these books, and this is exactly what Angela Carter was writing about, back in the 70s, in The Sadeian Woman . It’s partly polemic about pornography and prostitution, it’s partly literary history and history about the Marquis de Sade and his writings . She’s really exploring whether you can have sex that is divorced from politics and history and the power dynamics around you. People are still talking about that all the time, and I think that dilemma—that tension between the personal and political—is always central to feminism. This book was written long before the internet existed, but because of the widespread availability of pornography online, it’s absolutely fascinating to read now. It feels so resonant. Angela Carter is such an important part of Virago’s history. When we talk to writers who want to be published by us, or when we talk to people who want to work at Virago, hers is the name that comes up over and over again. A lot of us read and admired The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan , which came out recently. There’s so much discussion at the moment about sex and power and pornography and prostitution—or sex work, depending on your views. We felt The Sadeian Woman was a great choice because it was part of those discussions in the 1970s on how the second wave approached those issues, but it feels so up to date. It’s surprising; it’s provocative. You can’t help but find something challenging on every page. I thought about this really hard because you can classify it in so many ways. There is polemic in there, but it’s grounded in literary history and history as well. It’s slightly hard to categorize. As the publisher, we get to decide, and I put it down as cultural criticism in the end."

"This book has always been a real in-house favorite. In terms of thinking about what Virago does well, we always have excellent writing and we like to publish things that are provocative, funny, and surprising. This book is all of those things. There’s a poem in here called “Spring”. It’s about having been quite ill and scared over the winter and venturing out into the spring. The last three lines are: “I unbolted the door and stepped outside/only to have that daffodil baby/kick me in the eye.” She’s expecting spring to be all soft and lovely, but the daffodil kicks her in the eye after this difficult winter. I think that this collection, although it’s filled with beauty and laughter, also does kick you in the eye sometimes. Even the title is quite provocative. The first poems are about beauty and reframing our ideas about it. It’s reframing the idea of who the fat black woman is or could be, and how we look at her. It’s an amazing book of poetry, and it feels so central to what we do. We no longer publish any poetry on the frontlist—mainly because being a poetry editor is quite a specialist thing—but we really love the poetry on our backlist. We have Grace Nichols; we have some Maya Angelou; we have Anne Carson. We have incredible poets and this is something that we thought would be great to have as part of the Five Gold Reads. Another thing that made this book special for me is that we ran a reading group in conjunction with Women for Refugee Women , which is a charity that our author Natasha Walter set up. We read some of these poems in that reading group with women refugees from all over the world. That was a really amazing reading group, so these poems have a special resonance for some of us as well."

"There was no question that we were going to have a Sarah Waters novel on this list. She is absolutely core to Virago, another writer always mentioned by people who want to work here, including me. I just work here so I can get an early proof of her next book! We had to have her on the list, and it made sense to start at the beginning, with Tipping the Velvet . She wrote an afterword to the book quite recently, and a lot of what she writes there is why we wanted to include it. She wrote this novel because there wasn’t much fiction where she saw herself. Not that she was a 19th-century music hall star, but in terms of having LGBTQ+ characters at the center of a blockbuster novel that is read by hundreds of thousands of people. It’s that idea of taking stories from the margins and putting them in the center. We’ve always wanted to have untold stories—the kind she’s telling about drag kings in music halls (who were called mashers) and the queer side of London. Whether it’s very poor sex workers or incredibly wealthy women who drive around in carriages plucking urchins from the streets or a working-class lesbian couple, there are all these people in the book who had rarely been represented in mainstream fiction. For all those reasons, it felt like a really important book for Virago, especially in terms of LGBTQ representation. Some people think, ‘What’s a feminist novel?’ or ‘How can you have feminist fiction?’ Sarah’s a great example of that. She is telling untold stories and uncovering hidden histories, but she’s an incredible storyteller as well. Most of her fan mail comes through us, so we see all the people for whom this book has meant so much. People have such an intimate relationship with her work. One of my close friends named both of her daughters after characters in this book. My daughter has a very unusual name, Zena, and there’s a Zena in this book. When we were starting to plan our 50th anniversary, we looked through a lot of our marketing material for the past 50 years, and we found the catalog in which Tipping the Velvet was listed. Sarah Waters is now a superstar writer, published all over the world and shortlisted for major prizes, and it was amazing to see her first outing."

"This book came out in 2010, which was the beginning of a wave of feminist publishing. Caitlin Moran’s How to Be a Woman came out not long after. It was the start of this incredible explosion of feminist publishing after it had been in the doldrums for ten or fifteen years. When this book came out, a lot of people said, ‘We’re in a post-feminist world. Why do we need this book?’ Similar to Backlash , it really marked a moment of saying, ‘We really need feminism again.’ Natasha’s book is, again, about the personal and the political. Before she wrote this book she had believed, ‘We’ve advanced far enough in feminism that what people do in their personal lives—who they have sex with, how they have sex, what they wear—is irrelevant. We should be focusing on pay and legislation.’ But, as she says in the subtitle, she saw this return of sexism, this increase, on the one hand, of choice and freedom and liberation, but on the other, of women being funneled down this increasingly narrow chute of what it is to be desirable, what it is to be sexy. She’s making the argument that it’s partly about pornography, so we’re back to Angela Carter. It’s so interesting to read these two books alongside each other. They really speak to each other. Angela Carter is a feminist. There is feminist polemic in her book, but it’s also cultural criticism. Living Dolls is a full-on book about feminism and politics. It really bears rereading, especially thinking about technology. This book was written when online pornography was starting to get really huge, but it was before social media properly began. Smartphones had only been around for a little while. I read this book when it came out and I reread it recently. Although it was only 13 years ago, it’s fascinating to read as a historical document. Part of me thinks, ‘Wow, a huge amount has changed for good in the last 13 years.’ There’s been such an incredible flourishing of feminist activism online and in other places. But part of me feels depressed because some things are worse. The book bears rereading in lots of different ways. It still feels relevant. A lot of the book is about how women are being told or believing that they’re making decisions about their bodies, what they look like, and how they display their sexuality. It’s their choice. It’s freedom. But, actually, lots of forces are making them feel like they need to look like Barbie. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . We’ve kept the cover image from the original publication because it felt hard to beat. The image is playing with the physical ideals that you get from pornography—this aesthetically perfect, white, slim woman who I don’t think has ever had kids and is fully waxed—and the Barbie hair."

"Interestingly, this book was published in America in February 2018. It was written before Me Too but came out about six months after the Weinstein story broke. The main relationship in the book is a triangle. A woman writer has had this very long-term friendship with a problematic older male writer. At the beginning of the book, he commits suicide. He doesn’t leave a note, and the only instruction that he’s left is that he wants our narrator to take care of his Great Dane. Unfortunately, she’s in a tiny Manhattan apartment, and she’s not allowed to have a dog. The dog is in mourning for his master, and so is she. She and this dog are heartbroken. It’s a love triangle, a grief triangle, between the three of them. It becomes about her thinking about her friendship with this man who she knows has, quite unashamedly, slept with lots of his students. It was consensual, but there’s a power differential—he was a professor. He would say, ‘Teaching is erotic. This just happens.’ She confesses she actually slept with him too, but at the very beginning of their relationship. He’s had multiple wives and affairs. I remember reading it and checking the publication date thinking, ‘Wait! This can’t have been written before Me Too, but it’s straight into that debate.’ Sigrid has a lot of links with Angela Carter, in that neither of these writers is toeing the party line. Sigrid is unafraid to ask questions. Her narrator dearly loved this friend, and she’s not sure whether to condemn him or not. The narrator in the book has plenty to say about very judgy millennial and Gen Z students not wanting to encounter artists that they think are immoral. Like Angela Carter she has a lot of interesting things to say about the personal and the political. Can you separate the artist from the art? Can you separate the teacher from the seducer? And because the narrator has such mixed feelings about this man, he’s quite charismatic on the page. It’s a complicated book. It raises a lot of questions. I had lots of debates with my friends who’ve read it, about whether or not she lets the male writer get away with too much. You may see the dog on the cover and ask, ‘Is this a feminist novel?’ But yes, I would argue it is. There are a number of reasons we wanted to include it as one of our Five Gold Reads. We publish a lot of English writers from around the world. Sigrid is American, so it felt good to have an American writer on the list. Sigrid’s first novel was published in the UK in the early 1990s, and she hadn’t been published here since. We published The Friend in 2018. It was her seventh book. I think that’s something we do well. We pick up writers who are mid-career and maybe haven’t been published in this country for a long time or maybe need a reinvention. Again, we see things differently sometimes."