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On Reading Dido Miss Julia Hedge, the feminist, waited for her books. They did not come. She wetted her pen. She looked about her. Her eye was caught by the final letters in Lord Macaulay's name: And she read them all round the dome— the names of great men which remind us—"O damn," said Julia Hedge, "Why didn't they leave room for an Eliot or a Bronte!" Unfortunate Julia! Wetting her pen in bitterness, and leaving her shoe laces untied. When her books came she applied herself to her gigantic labours, but perceived through one of the nerves of her exasperated sensibility how composedly, unconcernedly, and with every consideration the male readers applied themselves to theirs. That young man for example. What had he to do except copy out poetry* Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room ike the entire section ofJacob's Room set in the British Library from which this passage is drawn, the scene depicted here ironizes in every direction: the complacency ofJacoband the predictable bitterness of Julia Hedge are soon enveloped in the larger ironies of museums, monuments, and culture. Woolf's look at textual traditions monumentalized in the Round ReadingRoom is scathing. The energetic resentment of Julia Hedge (Unfortunate Julia) offers no more direction (and commands no more sympathy) than the complacency of Jacob Flanders. And ultimately the social apparatus that supports the entire enterprise ofWestern culture is evoked: "The night-watchmen, flashing their lanterns over the backs of Plato and Shakespeare, saw that on the twenty-second of February neither flame, rat, nor burglar was going to violate these treasures— poor, highly respectable men, with wives and families at Kentish Town, do their best for twenty years to protect Plato and Shakespeare, and then are buried at Highgate." And yet that reading room draws one into its cavernous, monumental seriousness ("No one laughed in the reading room"), a room whose design uncomfortably echoes Bentham's panoptic model for the perfect prison, which Foucault reads as the emblematic gesture toward our own, complicit self-imprisonment in institutions and in knowledge.1 Indeed, the Reading Room in the 1990s—in the final years that the British Library 225 Epilogue L Epilogue will occupy the Round Reading Room in the British Museum on Great Russell Street—is a space where readers are literally under direct surveillance all the time, since library staff continually circulates in order to ensure that readers do not deface or steal books. Disciplined by tradition and policed by society, the modern reader encounters the textual pastpreserved and cataloged within monumental edifices. And yet, in Jacob's Room, Julia Hedge's presence in the Reading Room demonstrates that the British Museum admitted women readers at the same time that Woolf was denied access to the Bodleian. But even when admitted, women are apt to remain bitter—or so it would seem from the depiction of Julia. But I would have dared to be Dido. This is where I begin to suffer in a woman's place. Reading Virgil again, in the Aeneid (books 3 and 4); one sees how the venerable Aeneas, who is destined to found a city, is kept from the feminine danger by the gods. Women readers. In light of the cultural implausibility and theoretical difficulties evoked by the very term "women readers," it is easy enough to echo the sentiments of Julia Hedge, or to attempt to shore up that bitterness with the sense of difference that seventy years has made since Julia's remark, "Why didn't they leave room for an Eliot or a Bronte?" I might easily insert here a narrative of my own sense of intellectual comradery as I researched this book and came upon the dazzling work of women scholars in classical studies such as Maria Rosa-Lida de Malkiel, Mary Louise Lord, Judith Hallett, or Christine Perkell who suggest ways ofrevising traditional approaches to classical studies. Or I might acknowledge that there is now, near the end of the twentieth century, an astonishing group of established women medievalists whose work has shaped my own in ways I cannot begin to fully credit or disentangle. I could also mention the vast number of feminist theorists, scholars, and critics who work to open up possibilities of reading and writing in new modes. But reading itself remains a technology that genders those who perform it, and texts remain embedded in traditions central to cultural identities. This study shows how much modern critical approaches to Virgil are...

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