Neither to bury nor to praise

[oursin]

I see that it is 50 years since the foundation of Virago Press -

(Take, o take that peach away.)

And certainly, back in the day, it was a Good Thing bringing back into print and recognition a vast number of women writers, even if quite a number of the writers & works were ones I knew before they were cool before they appeared arrayed in green with the apple logo. And not all of them were that forgotten.

I could also go on a rant about the works and writers they did not revive, perhaps more about when they did the relatively well-known work/s of some moderately forgotten writer and did not delve further into their oeuvre.

I also have a few Massive Personal Irks: even before the recent massive debacle over Outrages, they published A Certain Work promulgating simplistic misleading narrative on Victorian psychiatry by someone who was clearly on excellent terms with Carmen C. Okay, I will forgive them a fair amount for also publishing e.g. Judy Walkowitz's stuff (which is great), but fear their academic peer review process was not perhaps All That and somewhat haphazard.

Also, over the course of decades, things have changed, as organisations and institutions do - reading those histories and memoirs, even though one felt that a fair amount had been omitted on legal advice, there was obviously a lot of upheaval and change with the moves from being an independent publisher to being an imprint of a conglomerate, as well as all the other stuff that was going down.

I have a belief that a) just because a thing doesn't last, doesn't mean it wasn't important and influential and b) a thing may last but is it carrying on the mission and the vision for which it was founded? (there are of course entirely legitimate reasons for course-change.)