ABSTRACT
Whilst women are key players within the contemporary publishing landscape, in the mid-twentieth century, women who made the leap from typing pool to editorial and managerial roles were still a small minority. This chapter focuses on the career of one woman who made her mark on British publishing and examines and discusses the different facets of her profile and legacy. In 1936, Norah Smallwood joined British publishing house Chatto and Windus as a secretary. Over the next forty-five years, she discovered and supported some of the twentieth century’s most talented authors, and ultimately became the firm’s managing director in 1975. The work of professional women within the publishing industry during this period was typically described using gendered terms such as ‘nurturing’, ‘midwives’, ‘mothers’, and ‘nurses’. Simultaneously, the rare women who rose to the top of the profession – Smallwood is a prominent, but not unique example – garnered another set of gendered stereotypes: ‘battleaxe’, ‘dragon’, and ‘harridan’. This chapter unpicks these tropes and explores Smallwood’s working relationships with significant women writers, including Iris Murdoch, AL Barker, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, using original archival research to offer new perspectives on the history of women in publishing and more specifically the role of women publishers in advancing the creative careers of women writers.
