My thesis is a contribution to the cultural literary and intellectual histories of the Virago Press exploring their success through the lens of the interlocking networks they created with the political communities of WLM, the book trade marketplace, and authors of the 1970s-1990s.

My research asks how Virago’s concern with its own place in history signifies their transition from publishers of emergent feminist work to purveyors of the dominant discourse of feminism, and how by changing the way history was conceived, they made it. This has wider resonances for scholarship of feminist histories as it provides a new frame of reference for academic understanding of the ways feminist discourses were transformed.

The network is both an object of inquiry and an approach in my research as it offers a framework for my discussion of how institutions such as Virago enact cultural, literary and political transformations. I draw upon a number of conceptual and methodological innovations to bring Virago’s story into focus. 

The networks I focus on are: 

• The Women’s Liberation Movement where I examine the overlapping and interlocking networks of Women’s Liberation writers, journalists, educators and activists that shaped and informed Virago’s early publishing practice in the period 1973-1980. I focus specifially on Virago’s contributions to feminist interventions in three eky areas: History, Education and Sexuality.
  
• The Impact of Individual Contemporary Authors where I focus on the impact Angela Carter, Maya Angelou and Margaret Atwood had upon the press. 
  
• The Virago Modern Classics where I consider Virago’s development of the series which constituted a paradigm shifting intervention in literary canon as a network which connected the forgotten generations of women writers with living writers.