Lisa Alther at The Women’s Press
I first met Stephanie Dowrick in 1978 at a Sunday lunch at writer Doris Lessing’s flat in London. I was taking a sabbatical from my life in Vermont, living in Hampstead and writing what would become my second novel, ORIGINAL SINS.
Stephanie had just returned from a trip to Berlin on behalf of her recently established Women’s Press. As we chatted, I was impressed by her energy, intelligence, and sense of humor. I learned that her first list included a reprint of Kate Chopin’s THE AWAKENING, one of my favorite novels.
Stephanie and I met often during my two years in London. Her biography intrigued me since I had never known someone from the wilds of New Zealand. She had also lived and worked in Israel and Germany. And somehow, at the age of only 27, she had scaled the pinnacles of British publishing, with important jobs at New English Library and Chatto and Windus. I admired her pluck in leaving those jobs to found The Women’s Press out of her own sitting room in the East End, prior to expanding to what seemed like a tiny, cluttered one-room office in Shoreditch.
Her plans included British editions of international feminist classics such as Shulamith Firestone’s THE DIALECTIC OF SEX, as well as newly commissioned works featuring neglected women artists like Paula Modersohn-Becker.
At that time, 80% of published books were written by men, and the publishing industry was considered a “gentleman’s profession.” Stephanie spoke of her goal of providing women writers with the same editorial attention and production standards as she’d done in her previous jobs in mainstream publishing. Her intention was also to protect her authors from being published alongside writers who were hostile to feminism, or to women in general.
Scribbling away on my new novel in my chilly London flat, with mold growing on the shoes in my closet, I started wondering if The Women’s Press might be an appropriate British publisher for it.
I had been very fortunate with my first novel, KINFLICKS, in that Doris Lessing had recommended it to Robert Gottlieb, her editor at Knopf in New York City. Robert Gottlieb was a brilliant editor and publisher with whom I loved working, and KINFLICKS had sold around 6 million copies in 18 languages.
The novel, although often comic, is a serious attempt to explore the roles available to young women growing up in America at that time. Generous critics have compared it to CATCHER IN THE RYE and TOM JONES.
While writing KINFLICKS, I assumed that because I could relate to the struggles of male protagonists in novels by men, male readers would relate to the struggles of my own female protagonists,
Some did, but a few male reviewers ridiculed the novel (and still do) as what came to be known as “chick lit”. I was ripe for a publisher with a feminist sensibility. Brainstorming, Stephanie and I came up with the title ORIGINAL SINS for my manuscript. Knopf remained my primary publisher for it, but The Women’s Press released a beautiful British edition with an evocative jacket that I adored, and a year later Penguin UK published the paperback.
ORIGINAL SINS features five children who grow up together – and then apart — in a small East Tennessee town in the mid-twentieth century, as winds of change are sweeping through the American South, challenging traditional racial, class, and gender assignments. As a Southerner myself, I was delighted when Stephanie asked me to contribute an introduction to Flannery O’Connor’s remarkable A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND, a short story collection unavailable in Britain at that time.
Flannery O’Connor is one of the quartet of Southern women writers whom I read voraciously as a teenager. (The other three are Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, and Carson McCullers.) I feel a great debt to them because they first showed me that Southern women could write – and write extremely well. They also showed me that my region was rich with material to write about. And they showed me how to write about it, with a gimlet eye and a sometimes grotesque sense of humor.
I relished the idea that with my novel and my introduction I was somehow contributing to Stephanie’s project of making the work of women writers and artists more visible and more available. And in retrospect I like to think that we both did help this to happen, since now over half of all published books are written by women, and women are performing close to 80% of the jobs at traditional publishing houses.
Stephanie Dowrick notes: Lisa is (typically!) far too modest about what she contributed to the profile of The Women’s Press, and its financial stability. That could not have happened at a better time, and was an incredible privilege – plus stimulating and fun – from start to finish.
Lisa Alther was a writer of such accomplishment and fame that every UK publisher would have mortgaged their offices to publish her. The previous success she had with Kinflicks was paralleled only by Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. Lisa’s literary skills, though, came with something invaluably extra.
She works in a bold tradition of Southern writers, both inside and outside the generic of “American writers”, sensitive to and knowing of race, culture, class as well as gender and sexuality issues that add texture and rare depth to everything she had then written, and has written since.
All of that – in Original Sins – came along with a magnificent capacity for big-canvas story-telling that is still rare, plus a sense of humour that made her a publisher’s dream. (She was also an outstanding interviewee; that helped as much then as it does now.)
Perhaps most notable for me to add is that Lisa had to convince Bob Gottlieb at Knopf that this barely existent “Women’s Press” could do justice to his star writer’s work. I might have been helped in this by Lisa assuring Bob G that in my previous role at Triad Paperbacks my Chairman and boss was his friend, Tom Maschler, a publisher widely regarded as Bob Gottlieb’s London “equivalent”. (Tom was the renowned Chairman of Jonathan Cape which, along with Chatto & Windus and The Bodley Head owned Triad Paperbacks jointly with Granada Publishing, and I was appointed as their pioneering Editorial Manager in 1975.)
In successful publishing, “contacts” and reputation are critical. Publishing Original Sins was recognized as a true coup in the UK and Commonwealth book industries. To add icing to that most nourishing of cakes, Lisa’s generosity allowed me to sell paperback rights to Penguin with a proportion of the advance coming back to the Press, making an enduring contribution to the legacy that Lisa describes above. And from which so many later writers benefited.