Wednesday 16th July 2025
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Interview: Virago Press

Ellen Peirson-Hagger
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Interview: Virago Press

“Virago means heroic war-like woman, or, as the Thesaurus has it for a particular kind of woman: biddy, bitch, dragon, fire-eater, fury, harpy, harridan, hussy, muckraker, scold, she-devil, siren, spitfire, termagant, tigress, virago, vituperator, vixen, wench.” 

Virago Press was founded in 1973 by Carmen Callil to publish women writers and feminist works. I spoke to Virago Deputy Publisher Sarah Savitt and Virago Modern Classics Director Donna Coonan to discuss how women’s writing has shaped them as readers and publishers, and the feminist responsibilities their jobs bring.

When you were younger, how aware were you of feminist writing? 

Donna Coonan: I was aware of Virago from quite a young age, partly because I went to a Catholic school and I liked the bite out of the apple logo—it was quite naughty. And partly because, although the school was run by a nun, she was quite an enlightened nun. A lot of our A Level texts were Virago books. We had Margaret’s Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Grace Nichols’ The Fat Black Woman’s Poems... It wasn’t until I got to university that I realised that the higher up you study, the fewer women you study.

Sarah Savitt: I have definitely always read women writers. I read Jane Eyre obsessively as a teenager. I had my most influential teacher in my last year at school and we read Wide Sargasso Sea and The Stone Diaries. They were two pivotal moments for me.

Have you noticed a change in the recognition of women in the industry?

SS: Now, there’s so much feminist writing, particularly non-fiction. It is an amazing time to be an editor. Because feminism is in the air politically, there is more discussion and recognition of the inequality. But when you look at prizes and the literary end of stuff there is still an imbalance in terms of who’s take n seriously and who gets the big solo reviews.

DC: Books by women are not reviewed as much, but also reviewers are predominantly men. When you look at readers, women are more ready to embrace male and female writers in a way that men aren’t. Men generally read men. It is a case of changing our reading habits too.

How much does the biography of a writer— their gender, race, sexuality—affect your perception of a work? 

DC: Regardless, a book would have to be of exceptional quality for us to take it on. But in the back of your mind you do have the idea that you are the gatekeeper for what the public will be able to read. It’s important that diverse voices are heard.

SS: There is morality in publishing. You do have to think about who you want to publish and promote. But there is also just a question of difference. As an editor you’re always looking for something different in any way—a novel narrated in the first person plural, or a novel about a country you’ve never read about, or British working-class voices that haven’t been heard. It’s also just about providing differing experiences for readers.

I read a really interesting piece this morning about Brit Bennett who’s just published a debut called The Mothers. She says “I don’t want my role as a writer to be a translator of black grief to white audiences.” There is that question of who a writer’s audience is, and how much you connect with that, and whether you connect with something because it feels familiar or because it does feel different. It’s so hard. If you thought about it too much you’d be paralysed. As a commissioning editor you have to go with your gut feeling about a book, so I don’t want to interrogate it too much in case that goes.

If you could choose one book on the Virago list to recommend to everyone, regardless of gender, what would it be? 

DC: It’s like asking us to choose between children! But I’m going to go for Marilynne Robinson—the whole trilogy—Gilead, Home and Lila. I love these books for the beauty of the writing and because they are profoundly humane.

SS: I’m going to say Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters. I love publishing books that sneak politics and morality under a huge amount of fun. But there is a sensibility underneath. Part of the reason I wanted to come to Virago was because I adore Sarah Waters. I gave it to one of my friends who is into more macho stuff—I mean that in a macho-literary way, more Philip Roth than Bear Grylls—and he adored it. And I felt vindicated.

Perspectives on Gender

Cherwell Culture
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Perspectives on Gender

2nd Year Classics and English Student, Magdalen

I usually enjoy being in the minority as a female Classicist at my college. The public school boys in my class may have been taught Classical languages for longer and with greater old-fashioned rigour than me, but I like bringing something different to the class. A partially self-taught flare for language, a real love of the literature and a bit of frankness and openness are more than a match for their instilled confidence. The backwardness has rarely held me back—but on one occasion it became too much. I signed up voluntarily for a Latin verse composition class last year, having dipped into it at my girls’ school with the help of a supportive teacher. The class was both full of and taught by old Etonians, from a textbook entitled something along the lines of Verse Composition for Eton Schoolboys. The last straw came for me when another boy in the class, who was from a different public school with a reputation for Classics, said he felt overlooked by the tutor because he wasn’t an Etonian. If he felt overlooked, this was nothing on how little I was encouraged. I ended up dropping something I was really interested in, instead directing all my efforts towards my tutorials with a young, female tutor who agreed about the department’s problems with institutional sexism.

In the admissions cycle of which this writer was a part, Magdalen received 377 female applicants and 372 male applicants. Only 44 (12%) of the female applicants were successful. Of the men, 72 (or 19%) got a place.

 

2nd Year History Student, Keble 

Discussing ancient Athenian gender politics with a male tutor and two boys was bound to be an interesting experience. Whilst it generally was one I enjoyed, the gender politics at work in my tutor’s office were at times shocking. Is it problematic that in tutorials discussing ancient misogyny, my tutor was forced to stop the discussion and specifically address a question to me as the only woman present because so far the conversation about the presentation of female sexuality in Greek comedy had been dominated by the men whose surrounded me? Perhaps the fact that the room had to be silenced in order for me to give my opinion suggests we haven’t moved as far away from the ancient patriarchal oppression that my tutor cheerfully pointed out was long gone—“it’s a shame that some of the brightest minds in Athenian society were ignored—they made a huge mistake in doing that”.

In spite of the fact that almost 60% of humanities students are female, the number of women holding professorships in the Humanities lies at a little over 38%.

1st Year English and French, Queen’s 

We’re often told that English is a girls’ subject, but I hardly expected it from the men studying it as well. When a male, fellow English student once said to me “you’re just more sensitive to literature than I am, because you’re a girl”, I was shocked. It shows that in spite of the definite academic shift, away from the tired clutches of gendered thought, sexist attitudes persist. I can go to a lecture on feminist theory and the construction of gender in Ulysses. I can write my English language essay on the meaning of the word “woman”, and indeed whether there is such a thing. I can discuss queer and gender identity with the DPhil students at my college, whose theses have given them room to explore these things. In spite of all this, we’re still falling into the trap of seeing gender as significant in explaining differences in who should study what. We know that this is an irrelevance, a safety blanket we need to let go of, but still, it persists.

The perception of ‘girly subjects’ causes problems even at the application stage: of the 56 applicants for English and French last year, 47 were female, and only 9 were male. These numbers are reflected in the wider humanities joint schools.

3rd Year French and Russian Student, Pembroke 

Among one of the most interesting things I brought home with me from Russia, aside from the cheap vodka and Putin T-shirts, was a better understanding of the Russian woman. The Russian woman, although I’d rather refrain from generalisations, exudes a courage and determination that I have rarely encountered in such a form. Living with a Russian “grandmother” and her daughter, I learnt a great deal about their willpower and admirable grit. Stepping off a minibus into the darkness of Yaroslavl, a tiny yet resilient Tanya greeted me and together we carried my 30kg suitcase up ten flights of stairs for lack of a lift. She complained not once, welcoming me with open arms and introducing me to her daughter of 25 who, despite the desires of her ex-husband, had pursued a successful career in dentistry while raising her four-year-old son with the help of her mum. Within half an hour I realised that these women were in need of no one else, or at least no Russian man (who my babushka frequently branded a waste of time). When gracing the male-dominated newsrooms of France and London later on that year, I would remind myself of the resolve of Tanya and Nastya, who would hold their own without grievance and who would never give up.

The University admits approximately even numbers of male and female applicants. The problem lies in localised areas, such as subject and college. For example, English continues to be ‘for girls’ (60% female), Engineering ‘for boys’ (82% male).

The smell of Christmas

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The smell of Christmas

The distinctive and lingering smell of frankincense overflows from Oxford’s numerous old churches at Oxmas time, heralding the approach of Christmas.

Researchers at the Institute de Chimie de Nice in France have recently distilled two new “highly potent and substantive odorants” in frankincense, present in fewer than 100 parts per million—the equivalent of a pinch of salt in ten tonnes of crisps. The implications of this discovery are revolutionary for the perfumery world and may even prevent the extinction of the species of tree from which frankincense resin is extracted.

The elusive molecules are named, somewhat unromantically, (1S,2S)-(+)-trans- and (1S,2R)-(+)-cis-2-octylcyclopropyl-1-carboxylic acid. Intensive research by the Baldovini group led to the eventual isolation of the cyclopropyl acid derivatives responsible for the basenotes, the longest lasting oils, of the famous scent widely used in the fragrance industry.

“We have patented the use of these compounds for fragrance formulation and plan to find a way to commercialise these acids as fragrance ingredients for perfumers,” stated Nicolas Baldovini, research leader, about the commercial aspects to this discovery.

Perfumery, or ‘per fumum’—through smoke, a reference to the release of fragrant chemicals through burning—is considered one of the earliest forms of chemistry. The frankincense resin, olibamum, which produces the scent in many popular scented products is believed to be one of the first aromatic materials used by mankind, dating back more than four millenia. Indeed, frankincense resins have been of huge social, economic, and religious importance throughout history, perhaps most famously as one of the presents offered to the infant Christ by the three kings in the Bible.

Baldovini’s desire to understand the chemical basis of ancient natural products used extensively in perfumery stems from the fact that “there is paradoxically little information on many raw materials concerning their impact odorants.” In other words, despite the extensive use of natural materials in perfumery, there is still a lack of research done to identify the constituent aromatic chemical molecules crucial to the scent that will allow artificial synthesize of the perfumes.

Despite nearly a millennium of use, the chemicals giving the strongest basenotes in frankincense products could, until now, only be distilled from natural resins collected by slashing the bark of the Boswellia sacra trees, unusual for their ability to grow out of solid rock.

Starting with three kilograms of frankincense resin from Somalia, Baldovini and his team isolated and purified approximately one milligram of the two carboxylic acid derivatives believed to give the incense its distinctive smell. Trained perfumers were used to confirm that the basenotes of frankincense were indeed given by the two molecules. Despite today’s unprecedented rate of technological advancement, our human nose is still the only instrument sensitive enough to detect the key components present in minute quantities in such mixtures. When used in conjuncture with analytical machines such as the Gas Chromatography Mass Spectrometer (GC-MS) or the Gas Chromatography-Olfactometer (GC-O) to determine the structure of the molecules present, the aromatic molecules are identified and their structures pinpointed.

The simple and economical chemical procedures used by the Baldovini group demonstrates that “natural aromatic raw materials are still poorly known goldmines.”

Recent studies in Ethiopia have shown that the overexploitation of frankincense-producing Boswellia could culminate in the loss of the entire species since intensive tapping causes the trees to divert too much of their carbohydrate stores into resin rather than for flowering and seed production.

“The trees, once damaged, do not regenerate. Fifty years from now, 90 percent of the Boswellia will be gone,” predicts Frans Bongers, Professor of Tropical Forest Ecology at Wageningen University.

Successful isolation of molecules providing the “characteristic old, churchlike basenote of the frankincense odour” as so aptly described by Baldovini, could allow cheaper and more readily available synthetic equivalents to be made artificially, preventing the otherwise inevitable extinction of Boswellia sacra because of commercial exploitation.

Christina Lamb on women’s writing and journalism

Christina Lamb
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Christina Lamb on women’s writing and journalism

This week, Christina Lamb guest edited the Culture section. Below is her editorial and her Rewind article. It was a pleasure to work with her, and we hope that you enjoy her illuminating insights.
Benn and Daniel

When the two male editors of Culture asked me to guest edit this special women’s edition, I thought it was very timely—expecting that by now we would have the first woman President of the United States and it could be a celebration of all things female.

Things didn’t quite work out that way. Not only did that glass ceiling fail to shatter but the man who held it up was a sexual predator who made derogatory comments about women. However, as Hillary said in her concession speech, “I know we have still not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but someday, someone will.”

And meanwhile women are breaking barriers. We, in the UK, have our second female Prime Minister and plenty to celebrate here in Oxford which of course got its first female Vice-Chancellor this year. Under her guidance, hopefully the University will do more to promote the work of women writers, poets, thinkers and scientists in its courses.

As for women of the future, if the quality of contributions for this edition is anything to go by, we are in safe hands. Sadly, we did not have space for all, but here today is some fabulous writing on and by women.

When I joined Cherwell way back in 1984 and submitted my stories to a male editor and male news editor, Britain was under its first female Prime Minister.

Three decades and several national newspaper jobs later, we now have a second female Prime Minister, but I am still yet to work for a female editor or news editor.

This is concerning as men and women have a different way of looking at things. In my field, which is conflict reporting, my male colleagues tend to be more interested in the ‘bang bang’, while we female reporters prefer to concentrate on the people behind the lines trying to keep life together, who are usually women. And we see them as heroines not as victims.

So whatever I might report, the person deciding what actually goes into the newspaper—and with what prominence—is a man.

My own career was very much helped by a woman and fellow Oxford graduate—and an unexpected invitation to a wedding. After graduating I spent a few weeks as an intern at the Financial Times and one day the foreign editor sent me in his stead to a lunch of South Asian politicians. This led to an interview with Benazir Bhutto, then Pakistan’s opposition leader living in exile in London. The day I met her she announced her engagement, and some months later, I got home from work to find a gold engraved invitation on my door mat.

Benazir’s wedding in December 1987 was my first visit to Pakistan and an incredible introduction to the country. The ceremonies were as colourful and magical as something out of the Arabian Nights and followed by long discussions with her political colleagues fighting to topple the military dictator. When a fortune-telling parakeet on Karachi beach told me I would return shortly, it was right.

As a journalist I see myself as a storyteller and I guess it can’t be a coincidence that many of the stories I have chosen to tell have been those of young women. In recent years I have been lucky to work on books with two very inspiring 16 year olds—Malala, the girl shot by the Taliban, and Nujeen, a disabled girl from Aleppo who taught herself English by watching soap-operas and made the journey to safety in Germany in a wheelchair.

And it turns out I am not the only one whose life was changed by Benazir. She introduced another fellow Oxford graduate, then Theresa Brasier, to Philip May, now Britain’s First Husband.

Corbyn speaks in Oxford ahead of NHS “funeral procession”

Ellen Peirson-Hagger
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Corbyn speaks in Oxford ahead of NHS “funeral procession”

Jeremy Corbyn pledged to “defend our NHS” during a speech in Oxford on Saturday morning, ahead of a 200-strong “funeral procession” for the NHS in Oxfordshire.

The Labour leader addressed a crowd at St Mary and St John church in East Oxford as part of the NHS action day, led by the Labour Party and campaign groups across the country.

Following Corbyn’s talk approximately 200 people took part in a procession, which was led by Keep Our NHS Public and Hands Off Our NHS.

Corbyn himself did not participate in the march, which started in Manzil Way at midday. Campaigners carried cardboard NHS coffins and wore Jeremy Hunt masks.

During his speech, Corbyn pledged to “put social care back in the public hands”, as well as addressing attitudes towards mental health.

He said, “We’ve got millions of people who support us. We can change attitudes by our own approach and our own attitude. No more jokes about people going through depression. No more jokes about people going through a crisis. Support them. Just as much as you would support someone who had a physical illness or an injury.”

Oxford University Labour Club (OULC) Secretary Thomas Zagoria told Cherwell, “Corbyn echoed Nye Bevan in forcefully calling for folk to fight for our NHS. Afterwards he mingled with us – the overwhelming impression he gives off when you meet him is kindliness.

“Having lived in the US, I know how important the NHS is. That the NHS is underfunded and understaffed is something everyone on the left, and most people across the political spectrum, can agree on. Corbyn has done a brilliant job in articulating that sentiment, in my opinion.”

A spokesperson for OULC told Cherwell , “We were delighted to see many labour members, including those in our club, get out and back the NHS. We know that only Labour will run the NHS we all need.”

In a post on Facebook, Labour Councillor Dan Iley-Williamson, who is also a student at Queen’s, wrote, “Today Labour held a national campaign day on the NHS, and here in Oxford we were lucky enough to be joined by Jeremy Corbyn.

“The crisis the NHS is facing is of the Tory’s making. They are defunding it and driving it to ruin. This is, I think, part of a strategy of undermining the NHS, creating a serious crisis within it, only then to offer “reform” (i.e. privatisation) as the solution.

“This must be fought with the utmost intensity. This is not only because free at the point of use healthcare is so important, but also because of the ideal the NHS represents – that access to services should be determined by need, not ability to pay. This ideal underpins the sort of society Labour is fighting for, and which together we can build.”

Merton finalist Harry Gosling told Cherwell, “Whilst this march was reasonably small, supporting the Health Service is certainly a worthy cause. Though the protesters, and people more generally, should recognise that the NHS’s problems extend far beyond shortfalls in funding.”

As part the NHS action day, campaigners also manned stalls around Oxford and Labour members went door-to door, spreading concerns about cuts to healthcare services.

Iris Murdoch’s Oxford Life

Benn Sheridan
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Iris Murdoch’s Oxford Life

“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.” This line appears towards the close of A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Iris Murdoch’s thirteenth novel, from 1970. As far as literary years go, 1970 does not stand up well. That year, the Booker Prize switched its requirements: whereas up until 1970, it judged books published in the preceding year, thereafter, from 1971, the prize was awarded to books published the same year as the award. This meant that all books published in 1970 were ineligible. Forty years on, her novel was amongst those selected for the ‘Lost Booker’, a testament to Murdoch’s enduring presence as a voice for the silenced.

I say this because in her novels and her philosophy, the subject she tutored at St Anne’s between 1948 and 1963, she sought to emphasise the inherent virtuosity of the inner life, a life untrammelled by notions of gender, sexuality or faith. In Oxford, her mark can be found not just in Anne’s, but in Somerville, where she was a first class Classicist, and Lady Margaret Hall, in whose gardens she was accustomed to go wandering. It must have grated that this avowed believer of ungendered morality should be compelled to remain within the academic confines of three then-female colleges, for Murdoch her womanhood an irrelevance compared to the cogency of her intellectual life. She would undoubtedly be proud to see that in 2016, women can be found in every College and PPH, from Hilda’s to St Benet’s Hall.

In 1996, her final novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, was criticised for its lack of cogency and reliance on tropes and clichés. A reviewer from the New York Times commented, “The story is a psychologically rich tale of romances thwarted and revived. The writing is a mess”. Few knew at that time that Murdoch was in the early stages of Alzheimers Disease. Within three years she was dead. But her mark on Oxford, where she demasculinised the profession of philosophy, and gave aspiring female authors a consummate intellectual to emulate, is indelible. And as for the flowers she loved so much? In those same gardens of LMH is a bench, dedicated to her memory, and ensconced by flowers. Visit, and be “mad with joy” in turn.

Love in a Renault Clio

Susannah Goldsbrough
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Love in a Renault Clio

Long car journeys will always mean Nancy Mitford to me. To preserve their sanity on a three-hour weekly round trip down the M4 with two small children, my parents tried every audiobook they could lay their hands on. At some point we discovered Love in a Cold Climate. On the face of it, a plot largely based on sex scandals was an odd choice for under tens. But strangely enough, of all the writers I was exposed to in the back of that Renault, it is Mitford who has stayed with me. As Prunella Scales’ drawl rumbled through the car like boozy steam off a Christmas pudding, the wasted hours magically lost their tedium.

In my memory, the grey drizzle of the M4 catches the sparkle of Cedric’s diamond studded turban, the hedgerows hide a pack of mud splashed, child-chasing bloodhounds and the heavy cloud morphs into white panels of floating taffeta. I roll unfamiliar words round my mouth like strange sugary sweets: “chub fuddler”; “lecherous lecturer”; “rampant vulgarity”. I imagine eating kippers at a weekend house party, wearing green velvet and silver to dinner, falling in love and falling out of it. And most of all I remember laughing. Because Nancy Mitford is one of the funniest writers ever to have put fountain pen to paper.

There is a wickedness to her humour that can’t be resisted. Take The Pursuit of Love’s heroine Linda’s throw away comment about her Communist friends: “Just at the moment he’s writing a book on famine—goodness! It’s sad—and there’s a dear little Chinese comrade who comes and tells him what famine is like, you never saw such a fat man in your life.” In a single detail, playing on the trope of the entitled upper classes trying to speak for the suffering millions, Mitford manages to make an entire political movement look idiotic.

Authentic English aristocrat as she was, Mitford recognised the absurdity of her world and mocked it with merciless glee. Like Dickens, she had a knack for noticing small eccentricities and translating them into defining characteristics. The result is a magnificent cast of characters hovering just the right side of credibility. “Wonderful old” Lord Montdore who might just as well have been made out of “wonderful old cardboard”, Davey who believes in getting drunk as “challenge to the metabolism” and Uncle Mathew, who wages guerrilla warfare against his housemaids but weeps over sentimental songs.

Mitford is deeply unfashionable, dismissed as a writer twentieth century chick-lit with inane romance plots that never extend beyond the ballroom into the real world. But these detractors can’t have read her work very thoroughly. The opening page of The Pursuit of Love has an underlying note of melancholy as “the minutes, the days, the years, the decades take [the family] further and further from the happiness and promise of youth”. It is not difficult here to draw a connection between the fictional Radlett family and Nancy’s own. Often remembered simply for their eccentricity, the real tragedy of the Mitfords, torn apart by political and sexual scandal, is surely present in the despondency of these lines.

Mitford is often written off as frivolous simply by virtue of being so funny. But there is nothing surprising in the idea of comedy and tragedy existing in close relation. Linda’s story has notes of the tragic bored by one husband, abandoned by another, she finally finds love only to have it snatched cruelly away.

Yet you would never think of Linda as a tragic heroine. She is far too ready to treat her life as an elaborate joke, heedless of reality. In this she is rather like her creator, who wrote her great love Gaston Palewski into her works, only altering the fact that the fictional Palewski returns Linda’s love whereas the real Palewski never did return Mitford’s. She turned her personal tragedy into a bitter literary joke for generations to enjoy.

She is the voice of a lost world, glamorising debutantes and duchesses and then corroding them with her acid observations. When you read a Mitford novel you are only ever a couple of sentences away from laughing out loud but perhaps more interestingly from profound sadness. She mixed tragedy and comedy in her own creative cocktail and then tossed it back like the true party girl she was. Read her to laugh or read her to cry but whatever you do, read Nancy Mitford.

One thing I’d change about Oxford… Hacking

Maxim Parr-Reid
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One thing I’d change about Oxford… Hacking

With different elections happening this week and the next, students appear to be driven by a very clear purpose: they are fighting like rats in a sack, jostling for a small clutch of prestigious society positions. Indeed, you would be forgiven if you thought that it’s all about “political hacking” for most Oxford students.

For many people, joining societies isn’t so much about hacking as meeting new people and friends. Societies continue to attract such people, no matter how ubiquitous the hacking is or how brazen the smear campaigns are.

Yet, when it becomes clear, as it will, that people only meet you for coffee, and that such meetings are only engineered to extract loyalty and votes, new members of societies will become cynical and suspicious. And if you don’t lend your vote to one slate, that just leaves you open to the hacking tactics of another faction. We should beware of late night invitations to Missing Bean or Pret.

Hardly anything in Oxford is untouched by the culture of hacking. This makes our ability to find genuine, like-minded people in doubt. Some hacks even organise special meetings to show how desperate they are to get votes. More experienced, wiser students will tell you that the hacking culture, and the snakes it creates, has put off many students from joining societies.

No wonder that societies already face a severe identity crisis. This is in part because of the snakes that abound, combined with the image of societies being dominated by public schoolboys, have prompted many to boycott such societies.

If societies fail to make it clear to outsiders they’ve more to off er than an omnipresent, omniscient culture of hacking, many more will be put off . That would be a shame, because Oxford’s societies do have many great things to off er to those who join them.

Sustainable journalism?

Stephen Lezak
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Sustainable journalism?

In October the International Energy Agency published a report announcing that new installations of renewable energy sources outnumber their fossil fuel-based counterparts for the first time in history. The news, included in the IEA’s annual five-year energy forecast, made headlines in several major media outlets, including the BBC and Bloomberg.

In one sense, this announcement was critically overdue. Meeting global targets for climate stabilisation, such as those set in Paris last December, will require a steep rise in renewable energy investment relative to recent years’ commitments. This was made clear in some news articles but had a notable absence from others.

This raises an interesting question: should findings such as these be reported simply as single, isolated sustainability victories or rather as important but incremental steps towards a still-distant goal?

The unyielding optimist would see the report as a sure sign that climate change will soon be consigned to the history shelf, alongside the now-healing ozone layer. By contrast, a pessimistic outlook might describe the news as the carbon equivalent of arriving at the train station in time to watch your train leaving the platform, too late to get on board. The space between these poles is a wide expanse of journalistic discretion.

These choices matter. The framing of environmental news shapes the opinion of readers. Journalists reporting on sustainability would undoubtedly benefit from understanding how their outlook on climate change affects their audience.

In recent years, social scientists have set out to engage with this particular issue. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have shown that reading an optimistic message about climate change will lead people to report, on average, greater belief that global warming is real. Meanwhile, a more ominous message increases scepticism. The authors suggest that, for many people, it is cognitively easier to deny the existence of climate change than to accept the serious implications of an unfolding global crisis.

On the other hand, overly-positive framing may be just as harmful. An article last year in ThinkProgress described the Paris climate accord as “literally world-changing.” It suggests that the agreement is likely to set off a cascade of economic and technological developments that will halt rising greenhouse gas emissions. A reader is left with the impression that, unless something goes terribly wrong, humanity is on a paved path toward a low-carbon future. These tradeoffs continue to confound independent journalism.

Evidently, a balance is required. Newsrooms should bear in mind that what they write and the content they omit can have unintended consequences. The idea that an article might contain ‘just the facts’ should be retired in the context of sustainability—which facts are reported and which are left out will necessarily colour a story, despite the best intentions to avoid bias. Ideally readers would also respond critically to stories that present climate change either as an impending apocalypse or a solved problem.

The movement toward a more liveable planet requires enormous changes to the way we produce and use energy, but above all it requires a shift in our thinking. Reporting should empower even as it emphasizes the magnitude of the task at hand. Finding this journalistic balance will play an essential role in the movement towards a more sustainable planet.

A pioneer erased: Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Alice Townson
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A pioneer erased: Sister Rosetta Tharpe

If someone were to ask if you’d ever heard of an artist named Sister Rosetta Tharpe, what would you say? Granted, if it was your mate with loads of vinyl who always scoffs and says, “What do you mean you don’t have a record player?”, you might try and feign some sort of vague knowledge, but if we’re being honest with each other, you haven’t heard of her. Most people haven’t.

At least not until 2011, when BBC Four aired an hour long documentary entitled ‘The Godmother of Rock & Roll.’ The “original soul sister” deserves your attention. Born in 1915, a decade before Chuck Berry, to two cotton pickers in Arkansas, Sister Rosetta Tharpe would go on to be one of the best and most exciting guitar players America had ever seen.

She attended the Church of God in Christ (CGIC), a domination known for its musical expression and its progressive view on gender roles within the Church. She first picked up a guitar at the age of six and spent the rest of her childhood touring the US with her mother before they moved to Chicago where she continued to perform.

By 1938, her first marriage to preacher Thomas Thorpe (from whom she adopted her stage name) having failed, she moved to New York to further her musical career, appearing at John Hammond’s ‘Spirituals to Swing’ concert at Carnegie Hall in the same year. Sister Rosetta was ground-breaking—not only was she black, not only was she a woman, but she also also dared to mix gospel and secular music, even when met with criticism and abuse.

Her critics, and also her fans, would often say of her that she could “play like a man” but one look at her performances tells you that she could play far better and in a far more modern way than anyone else, woman, man or otherwise, in the late 1930s and 40s. Gordon Stoker says of her guitar skills that, “she did incredible picking. That’s what attracted Elvis to her. He liked her singing, too. But he liked her picking first, because it was so different.”

This comment may appear flattering, but it is symptomatic of the way that Sister Rosetta is constantly discussed and remembered amongst music critics and historians: always in reference to the men who came after her, who were ‘more important’ than her, whom she influenced. She is constantly cited as a ‘pioneer’ of rock’n’roll or a major influence on artists like Elvis, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash and Little Richard, but she was, in her own right, an astounding musician.

Her daring was even such that it would spell her demise. In the early 1950s, Sister Rosetta attempted to blend gospel with blues, but consequently became so unpopular with her conservative gospel fans that, by the end of the decade, she had been dropped by her record label, Decca. She was able to continue to perform right up until her death thanks to an invitation to tour the UK with trombonist Chris Barber in 1957 and her resulting European fan base, but her reputation in the US had been marred not only by criticism from gospel-lovers, but also with accusations of bisexuality.

She died of a stroke in 1973 and was buried in an unmarked grave. A posthumous revival has been sparked due to praise from Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, but it is important that we do not remember her as an influence on the male artists that came after her. Rather, we should recognise her astounding musical talent in its own right, viewing her as testament to the continuing whitewashing and sexism of rock’n’roll.

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