ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the question of whether working-class women should be allowed to read at all was a persistent issue in the late nineteenth century, not just among the middle-class men who ran libraries, wrote reviews, and largely controlled access to print, but also among middle-class and even working-class women, like Hilda/Margaret's mother. Like "good" writing, "good" reading has often been thought of as cerebral, as having to do with minds rather than bodies. Many nineteenth-century critics, mothers, and mistresses worried that the reading of girls and working-class women was too anchored in their bodies. They resorted to bodily metaphors to describe it, linking it to addiction, binge eating, and self-poisoning. Women were prone, these critics feared, to reading for sensation rather than the calm of reasonable or moral reflection. The corpus of texts, the body of work, finds in the archive is dead unless, as researchers and writers, can bring it back to life, revivifying it for own times.