Ursula Owen

I was interested in reading this memoir because of Ursula Owen's role in setting up the publishing company Virago with Carmen Callil and several other women. Compared to another Virago memoir, Lennie Goodings' A Bite of the Apple, Virago is a relatively small part of Ursula Owen's story (some readers might be disappointed by this). Ursula Owen was involved in the early years of Virago but had left by the end of the 1980s.

She writes more about her parents and childhood, about her marriage to show more historian Roger Owen, spells of living in Egypt and Lebanon, adopting a daughter, the women's movement, her later work for the Labour Party (in opposition in the early 1990s) and then for Index on Censorship.

This was beautifully written and I enjoyed her thoughtful reflections on the personal and political and everything else

There are no footnotes. There are quite a large number of photographs but they are simply reproduced in black and white within the body of text of the book, on quite ordinary paper. This does mean that there is no need to keep breaking off reading to look things up, though.

As many of her friends, lovers and colleagues, and the writers she worked with, are reasonably well known and also of interest to readers of this book, an index would have been useful. show less