Virago Modern Classics to publish Mavor’s Booker-shortlisted A Green Equinox

Virago Modern Classics will publish Elizabeth Mavor’s 1973 Booker-shortlisted "lost gem" A Green Equinox.

The book has been out of print for decades, despite being a “brilliant exploration of gender and female desire – platonic, sexual and cerebral”, according to the publisher.

Editorial director Donna Coonan acquired volume and audio rights in British Commonwealth territories, excluding Canada, from Nathan Rostron of McNally Editions. The novel will be published in September 2023.

Coonan said: “I read A Green Equinox last year. A recommendation had come through the Virago inbox, but the book was so scarce that I spent months tracking down an affordable copy. Sometimes, from the very first sentence of a book, you know you’re going to love it, and I fell for this from a great height. This really is an unfairly neglected gem.

“By a quirk of fate, one of my fellow classics sleuths, Lucy Scholes, who commissions for McNally Editions, had also discovered A Green Equinox and already had plans to publish. It’s the story of Hero Kinoull, an antiquarian bookseller who is quietly having an affair with a married man – an expert on Rococo art. Within six months, from equinox to equinox, Hero becomes besotted by her lover’s do-gooding wife, and then with his indomitable mother. On first publication, the London Review of Books said: ’Elizabeth Mavor relishes spirited, unorthodox women, free with their tongues and ready to snap their fingers at convention.’ That’s something that just doesn’t date, and I can’t wait for readers to discover A Green Equinox.”

Mavor was born in Glasgow and educated at Oxford, where she was the first woman to edit the university magazine, Cherwell. She wrote five novels and was married to the cartoonist and illustrator, Haro Hodson, with whom she had two sons.