Before creating their public personae in a wider world, Germaine Greer and Clive James enrolled as postgraduates at Cambridge and appeared in student theatre. By contrast, Callil’s career was an impromptu solo effort, and all the more impressive for that reason. She was twenty-two when, newly arrived in London in 1960, she advertised for a job in publishing. She had only a BA from Melbourne and no credentials in the publishing industry. Her advertisement brought her a menial job with Hutchinson’s. It was only a few years later that she became a major force in British publishing. As well as founding Virago, she was also later appointed Managing Director/Publisher of Chatto & Windus and was temporarily a roving editor for Random House.

A summary of Callil’s career might make her sound like a high-achieving establishment figure. That would leave out other qualities. She is outspoken, often a contrarian, passionately committed to ideas. A strong feminist but not easily categorised, she says that she ‘never bothered with wars about makeup or bras or “chairmen”’. She just thought, ‘get on with it’.

Callil didn’t shirk literary controversy. In 1997 she publicly derided the Booker Prize-winner, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. In 2011, as a judge for the Man Booker International award, she resigned over the choice of Philip Roth.

Carmen Callil (Kaupo Kikkas/Penguin)

Moving away from the publishing world, Callil has taken to historical research with formidable energy. In 2006 she published Bad Faith, a passionate exposure of French anti-Semitism and collaboration with the Nazis during the German occupation in World War II. This book stemmed from Callil’s witnessing of a personal tragedy: the suicide of her therapist whose father had been one of the betrayers of the French Jews. Her new book takes Callil into family history. She began by considering the intertwined stories of her forebears: English, Irish, and Lebanese who were sent or emigrated to Australia in the nineteenth century.

As she worked through her material, she decided to concentrate on her mother’s family and in particular the story of her own great-great-grandmother Sary. Born out of wedlock in 1808, Sary was taken into the new family of her mother’s marriage to a journeyman framework knitter, Thomas Allen. Her story, painstakingly constructed from the minutiae of public records, shows the desperate plight of England’s labouring poor.

Callil has read widely in place and period to expose the drudgery of the knitters in Allen’s home territory in Leicestershire. Children aged between three and seven could begin winding and sewing; at twelve they could work the frame as well as an adult. Following Sary’s story, Callil details the further cruelties of the Industrial Revolution. New machines were easier and cheaper to operate; the cottage industry was wiped out and many fell into abysmal poverty. When she was nineteen, Sary had a child with canal worker George Conquest, who was twenty-one. Probably in order to pay the ‘bastardy indictment’ which would save the parish the expense of supporting Sary and her daughter, George stole some hemp to sell. This led to a brutal period in the hulks, followed by his transportation to New South Wales under conditions of appalling cruelty. Yet George was a survivor. The story brightens when, after serving his seven years, George became a man of property; eventually he returned to England, found Sary, and was able to bring her to Australia. She was then fifty years old with a son, Alfred, who accompanied her.

Although her book is a searing history of deprivation and injustice, Callil gives it the title Oh Happy Day. Bad as it was for George Conquest, he was spared the misery of England in the ‘Hungry Forties’. He and Sary settled in Melbourne in the gold rush period. On his death, Sary was left a house of her own in Prahran and some rental properties to maintain her.

That might sound like a happy ending. Yet it is qualified by the likenesses that Callil finds between imperial Britain and the present-day scene, in which ‘the rich still prey on the poor’. Sary and George were the paupers, asylum seekers, and refugees of their day. Callil deplores the wilful forgetting of the past, the dismantling of the postwar social welfare system, and ‘the Brexit malady’. Australia, Callil believes, still has time to make another history – and she adds, perhaps doubtfully, ‘the English do too’. Oh Happy Day gives a voice to the voiceless and adds another major work to Carmen Callil’s formidable achievements.

Correction: The print edition of this review mistakenly refers to Carmen Callil as the founder and chair of Chatto & Windus and managing director of Random House. Callil was founder of Virago, Managing Director/Publisher of Chatto & Windus, and was temporarily a roving editor for Random House.