SARAH LEFANU (NC 1971) AND JILL NICHOLLS (NC 1971) DISCUSS THEIR ROLE IN ENSURING A VOICE FOR WOMEN IN THE MALE-DOMINATED PUBLISHING WORLD OF THE 1970S AND 1980S (CHAIRED BY REBECCA ABRAMS NC 1982)
Two alumnae with many stories to tell about feminist publishing in the 1970s and 80s come together in this lively conversation, chaired by author and journalist Rebecca Abrams.
Throughout the 1980s Sarah LeFanu was an editor at The Women’s Press, and was responsible for their ground-breaking feminist science fiction list. Her Newnham contemporary Jill Nicholls worked at Spare Rib, which called itself – after much discussion – ‘a magazine of Women’s Liberation’. It was glossy, lively and sold in WH Smith’s and on the newsstands next to magazines like Cosmopolitan. Its aim was to be a popular magazine available to anyone throughout the UK.
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
JILL NICHOLLS (NC 1971) read English at Newnham. While at Cambridge she became involved in the Women’s Liberation Movement and helped found a Cambridge newsletter/magazine called Redstockings. After graduating she drove a delivery van in London and achieved equal pay for herself and the other women drivers; she considers this her greatest feminist success! During six years at Spare Rib, she also taught at a further education college and wrote for more mainstream magazines for women as well as forNew Society, Time Out and The Guardian. On leaving Spare Rib, she was involved in setting up Sheba Feminist Publishers, an independent small press. Since 1983 she has worked in television, making documentaries.
SARAH LEFANU (NC 1971) is an author. pictured left of image with Suzanne Perkins (TWP Art Director) on the right at the Frankfurt Bookfair in the early 80’s. Behind, a display of Javadi Alley by Manny Shirazi and The Subversive Stitch by Roszika Parker. Her books include Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind (co-editor) (1986), In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (1988), Rose Macaulay: A Biography (2003) and its companion volume, Dreaming of Rose: A Biographer’s Journal (2021), S is for Samora: A Lexical Biography of Samora Machel and the Mozambican Dream (2012) and Something of Themselves: Kipling, Kingsley, Conan Doyle and the Anglo-Boer War (2020; shortlisted for the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography). From 2004 to 2009 she was Artistic Director of the Bath Literature Festival. She lives in North Somerset, and regularly chairs events for the Bristol Festival of Ideas and the Bristol Women’s Literature Festival.
REBECCA ABRAMS (NC 1982) is an author, editor, teacher and journalist. Her books include Woman in a Man’s World, Touching Distance, The Jewish Journey, When Parents Die and Three Shoes One Sock & No Hairbrush. She is a long-standing tutor on the Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford and a regular literary critic for the Financial Times.
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