In Memoriam

Georgina Hammick, who edited a Virago short story anthology, The Virago Book of Love and Loss, has died aged 83 (May 1939-January 2023)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/13/georgina-hammick-obituary

She was herself a writer but seems to have suffered from a lack of confidence in her work, and published two novels and two short story collections, and although there isn't a copy listed on LT under her name, was one of 5 poets whose work was published in a group collection.

She is one of the many women quoted in Ysenda Maxtone-Graham's book about girls' boarding schools, Terms and Conditions, which has quite a lot about how many posh families didn't want their daughters to get a really good academic education, but saw school as preparing them for marriage and motherhood.

I've put a thread title In Memoriam so that we have a thread to use for authors and other figures connected with Virago.

i just looked her up in a library catalogue. It didn't contain any of her works but she was cited in a book Such Devoted Sisters edited by Shena Mackay.

It is a collection of short stories and a number of Virago authors are contributors including Elizabeth Gaskell, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Janet Frame,

Elizabeth Jolley and Louisa May Alcott etc.

>2 kayclifton: I don't remember the stories but I remember enjoying that anthology, Kay.

Sad to hear that the author of books for adults and children, Kate Saunders, has died of multiple sclerosis a few days short of her 63rd birthday. As well as writing a number of historical sagas and contemporary commercial novels, a crime series about Laetitia Rodd, a series of books about The Belfry Witches, a sequel to E Nesbit's Five Children and It, Five Children on the Western Front, she reviewed books, edited a short story anthology and wrote a couple of introductions to Virago Modern Classics by Barbara Pym and Elisabeth von Arnim, and was an Orange Prize judge (in the year when Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun won.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/24/kate-saunders-obituary

Another sad passing. It's a beautiful obituary by Amanda Craig.

Thought I'd add Carmen Callil's obituaries to this 'In Memoriam' thread. It will be a nice place to remember our much loved authors.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/18/dame-carmen-callil-obituary

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/18/virago-founder-carmen-callil-was-a...

>6 bleuroses: Thanks

>6 bleuroses: That's a nice idea Cate - thank you! x

Louise Meriwether, author of Daddy Was a Number Runner (first published apparently by The Feminist Press in New York in 1970, published here as a VMC) has died, on 10 October at the age of 100 (she was born in May 1923). She published other books and short stories - I have a copy of a novel, Shadow Dancing, but her first novel, about a girl growing up in Harlem, remained her most famous. She was also a journalist, a creative writing teacher and a political activist, and apparently part of a lively black writers social scene who partied together. She has been mentioned as an inspiration by more recent black women writers including Jacqueline Woodson.

I just requested her book Daddy Was a Number Runner from a library system that I patronize.

Novelist A S Byatt has died aged 87.

She wrote introductions to a number of Virago Modern Classics and other literary reprints, including several novels by Willa Cather (My Antonia, A Lost Lady and Rachel Ferguson, The Brontes Went to Woolworths and some of Grace Paley's work - I'm going on the info I can find on Librarything and not double checking this information in my copies or elsewhere, so I'm not totally sure which copies of books in my own collections do have the introductions by her (and some VMCs have been published with two or three introductions by different authors, just to confuse people like me who take these things seriously). She considered herself "too old" to be part of the women's movement (though I think she was the same generation as many of the women involved).

>11 elkiedee: I have read a number of her books and now intend to reread Still Life.

Byatt was the sister of Margaret Drabble.

I'm only just now seeing this and am very sad. I loved Possession and the Frederica books, and I miss knowing that Byatt is no longer in our world.