Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present (review)

Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley's Reading Women: Literary Figures and Cultural Icons from the Victorian Age to the Present, starts with a fundamental question: what is it about images of reading women that continue to hold people's attention? For those interested in this question, Reading Women offers provocative, helpful answers. Influenced by Kate Flint's seminal The Woman Reader, 1837–1914, Badia and Phegley explore the woman reader in a wider historical context than do many previous studies on this topic. They open their collection in 1840s England, with Antonia Losano's "Reading Women/Reading Pictures: Textual and Visual Reading in Charlotte Bronte's Fiction and Nineteenth-Century Painting" and close in the present-day United States with Mary R. Lamb's "The 'Talking Life' of Books: Women Readers in Oprah's Book Club." Badia and Phegley also consider the woman reader in some surprisingly unexpected contexts—not only Oprah's televised book club, but also women reading in the British Library, women readers portrayed in Hollywood film, and even women readers as they are being used to market a current line of stationary. By considering such a multitude of contexts, Badia and Phegley fulfill their objective of enriching scholarly conversations about readers in history that Flint helped initiate. Indeed, Flint's helpful Afterword to this collection suggests future possible directions for scholarly inquiry in this discipline.

Two essays stand out as particularly noteworthy for VPR readers: Phegley's "Images of Women Readers in Victorian Family Literary Magazines," and Ruth Hoberman's "Depictions of Women in the British Museum Reading Room, 1875–1929." Phegley focuses on Braddon's editorship of Belgravia and Thackeray's editorship of Cornhill. Although more conservative in its approach to the woman reader than Belgravia, Cornhill did champion women's intellectual curiosity and argued that reading were quality literature could make women better citizens, wives, and mothers. Belgravia, predictably, put fewer conditions on women's reading. Whether "quality" or "sensation," Belgravia believed that women were capable of determining what and how to read, and more importantly, that women had every right to read for themselves—not only for the benefit of others. Phegley's analysis of Belgravia is particularly well done: she calls attention to under-explored portions of the magazine that will interest VPR readers, particularly as those portions concern Belgravia's ongoing debate about women's reading. Hoberman concentrates on women who used the British Museum reading room from the 1880s through the 1920s, with particular attention given to Eleanor Marx, Beatrice Potter, Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf. Women using the reading room from the 1880s to 1907, Hoberman convincingly argues, were delighted with its resources, often ignoring the "Ladies Only" section and sitting at whatever desk they chose—to the consternation, bemusement, and frustration of male patrons. However, from 1907, when the reading room was remodeled, up to the 1920s, women no longer viewed the reading room as a liberating space of vast resources; instead, they alluded to it in their writing as a male space that oppressed the women working there. The reasons are complex, and Hoberman covers several, with one reason concerning its decoration. When patrons returned to the room after its remodeling in 1907, they were now greeted with a ring of men's names inscribed in the moldings just beneath the dome. The reading room's accumulated cultural weight turned women who used it into mere thoughts in the dome's "huge bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names," as Woolf writes in A Room of Her Own.

Insightful essays on authors born after Woolf, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Ann Petry, and on many authors born before her, including Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott, round out this collection. Badia and Phegley have included essays that touch directly on important historical themes and which address these...