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There is no winning formula for a rediscovered classic. The humorous exploits of a dowdy English governess over the course of a single day in the Thirties have become a huge hit for Persephone Books. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, by Winifred Watson, first came out in 1938 and has remained a bestseller since it was reprinted by the publishing house eight years ago. Now it's an American box-office success as well. But such hits have much to do with timing, fashion and serendipity.
Virago Press, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, was launched to celebrate forgotten and overlooked women writers. Its first title, Antonia White's Frost in May, from 1933, was about a nine-year-old girl closeted in an English convent and seemed an unlikely bestseller in the Seventies. Still, its popular appeal rescued White from penury and secured Virago's future.
Other writers were only "discovered" after their death. Emily Dickinson, who published just a dozen poems in her lifetime, bequeathed a collection of 1,800 poems to posterity. She is now acknowledged as one of American's finest poets. The works of Herefordshire metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne continue to be "discovered" 350 years after his death. His reputation as an equal of John Donne rests on a chance find of his lost works in a London bookshop bargain basket in 1896. Other volumes turned up on a Lancashire rubbish heap, at a library in Washington, and in 1997 at Lambeth Palace.
John Kennedy Toole's novel A Confederacy of Dunces was written in 1967 but it wasn't published until 1980, 11 years after he committed suicide. Toole's mother spent seven years trying to get it published and a year after its release it won the Pulitzer Prize.
But perhaps the most remarkable literary rebirth of recent times has been Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road. It was published in 1961, nominated for a National Book Award, then sank into obscurity. "Rediscovered" by Methuen in 2001, a film starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio is due out later this year.
If you haven't read it, you are in for a treat. But be warned that its portrayal of a suburban Fifties marriage is one of inspissated gloom. I pressed it into the hands of a female friend to make her realise that single life isn't so bad, especially when married life can be a whole lot worse. It seemed to do the trick. She loved it.
Nothing guarantees that Revolutionary Road won't go out of print once more. Many of the Virago modern classics have suffered such a fate. But, as with Miss Pettigrew, every publishing cloud has a silverscreen lining. And future generations will be given the chance to rediscover them all over again.
