The Woman Reader [Hardcover]

This is a popular rather than a scholarly history of the relationship between women and books. Jacks says in her introduction that she intends to write the history of women's reading, but in practise, perhaps understandably, this book is more a history of women's writing - the two may certainly overlap, but are not the same. It has an enormous scope, so covers the entire history of the world from the dawn of civilisation to the present, and all places from the ancient Middle East to China, via Europe. This does give the narrative a rather fragmentary air as we sweep in a couple of pages between cultures.

The narrative is primarily descriptive rather than analytical: so it gives us details of books that women certainly might have read but that men read too (e.g. Sappho, Behn, Austen, George Eliot, Wollstonecraft etc.), and there is no attempt to distinguish something about the way in which women might have read, or what they thought of books aimed at women. The idea that women readers might subvert intended moralisations, or resist, for example, female conduct books isn't really brought out here.

I appreciate that this is a difficult topic (how do we capture the way in which women read across time other than through what they wrote?) and that it's not until the seventeenth century that we have records of women's libraries in Europe, for example. Nevertheless, there is much academic work currently being done on recuperating women's reading (as well as writing) practices in specific time periods and places which make no impact on this book.

So if you're looking for a general survey-style history which takes a non-specific and non-scholarly approach (i.e. no original research, no central thesis or argument), then this is an interesting and accessible read, written in a fluent and buoyant style.

(This review is from an ARC courtesy of the publisher)

Belinda Jack's book on women as readers is hugely ambitious in scope, starting with cave paintings and ending with e-readers, and including comments on China, Japan and Afghanistan as well as Europe and the US. A more focussed approach might have been more satisfying, since cramming all this into 300 pages means it is inevitably discursive and superficial.

Jack does not attempt to fit her many historical references into an identifiable argument or theoretical framework, so the reader may finish it feeling that he/she has acquired a large number of facts but not a great deal of understanding. Its encyclopaedic nature means it could be used as a sort of reference manual, but unfortunately it is let down by a number of factual inaccuracies. On p156, for example, she describes the life and work of Anna Maria van Schurman, a famously learned woman who lived in Utrecht, but ascribes her achievements to Lucrezia Marinella, who was an entirely different person based in Venice. Madame de Sevigne is included on p176 in a list of novelists, which would have surprised her, and the civil war known as the Fronde (p220) did not take place in the mid-eighteenth century but from 1649-1652.

The book comes alive when Jack is writing about the eighteenth-century English novel, where she conveys both detailed facts and interesting opinions. One feels she could have written a highly informative and entertaining book on "The Women Novel Reader", commenting for example on the way the reading of novels affected women's behaviour, and how this is reflected in other works of fiction (one thinks, for example, of Sheridan's fun in "The Rivals" at the expense of Lydia Languish, or Austen's observations on Marianne in "Sense & Sensibility"). Alternatively, if she had some novel or challenging theory of how women's reading has affected social development over the centuries, the expanded timescale and reference to non-European cultures (which in this book feel a little perfunctory) would be justified. Unfortunately, this book could be considered to have fallen between two stools.

In many ways, the history of the woman reader is the history of reading. Women have been reading since the beginning, as far as we can tell. The history of women readers is also a history of women writers, since much of the evidence that women have been reading comes from their also having written.

And although it's a fairly broad(!) history of women readers, the emphasis is on Western women readers. Author Belinda Jack alerts us to the existence of women readers throughout the ages in China, Japan, and the Islamic world, but the bulk of the narrative is about women in ancient Mesopotamia and Greece, then Europe, and North America.

I was surprised to read that women in ancient Babylon were among the scribes who copied works for official use. Fourteen of 185 professional scribes in one list that dates from as early as 1850 BC were women. Being a scribe in the ancient world may not have been an especially prestigious job, but it was important and required extensive training. And apparently there was nothing odd about women doing it.

From Roman times through medieval times, whether a woman learned to read usually depended on her class. Upper class boys and girls learned to read, usually at home. Lower classes did not.

An interesting tidbit is the first known reference (around AD 350) to reading silently, to oneself. In the beginning, reading was done as a social or professional activity, out loud. Reading silently allowed people to read individually, a potentially dangerous and subversive pastime.

Of course, another milestone was the printing press, which allowed mass production of books and pamphlets, leading to a cycle of greater literacy leading to greater diversity of reading materials leading to more readership. Big inroads into literacy took hold in the 15th and 16th centuries, until by the 17th century, most men and women of all classes could read.

What women read was revealing. Mostly, women read what men were reading. But they also read romances and books about gardening and housework and child-rearing. We discover that Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, purchased a French romance novel in the 1480s. The publisher, William Caxton himself, the publisher of the first books in English, used this celebrity connection to advertise the book, even though there is no evidence that Margaret ever read the book, or if she did, that she cared for it, since she never bought another like it.

Belinda Jack covers literacy into the 21st century, in which literacy rates for men and women are much the same through the developed world, but there are pockets of inequality that are quite disturbing, especially in Afghanistan, many Arab states, and in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Woman Reader is a very enjoyable and informative book, with dozens of illustrations that are often as intriguing as the stories behind them.

(review copy courtesy of NetGalley and Yale U. Press)