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

Robin Chamberlain is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

This collection of scholarly essays traces the ways in which the figure
of the woman reader has shaped literary culture in both Britain and
America. By beginning with a chapter about reading women in Charlotte
Brontл’s fiction and ending with a study of women readers in
Oprah’s book club, the collection shows the dynamic trajectory of the
woman reader, and thus the ways in which this mutable figure both
responds to and creates literary culture.

The woman reader explored in the book is both fictional (as in the
chapter about Brontл’s reading heroines) and real (as in the members
of Oprah’s book club). In both cases, as the collection shows in its
unifying focus on the representation of reading women, the woman reader
can herself be read as a sign operating on various discursive planes. As
a sign, the woman reader becomes the site for discussions about the
effects of reading on the female body, about reading as pleasure and
escapism, and about the potential for both social and individual
transformation that reading provides.

In both the 19th and 20th centuries, anxieties about the woman reader
resulted in attempts to regulate women’s reading—a theme explored in
this volume by Janet Badia, Michele Crescenzo, and Barbara Hochman,
among others. One of the rationalizations for this control has been the
fear of the effects of reading on the female body, as Suzanne Ashworth,
Antonia Losano, and Ruth Hoberman show in their excellent contributions.
Picking up one of the other main themes in the book, Elizabeth Fekete
Trubey, Sarah Wasworth, and Mary Lamb examine the various
possibilities—ranging from pleasurable escape to social
transformation—located within the reading experience. All of the
essays come together in showing how the woman reader is, ultimately, a
subversive icon.