ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the idea that the depiction of solitary, silent reading may
be interpreted as a representation of individuals exercising a right to privacy in
public. I argue that the intellectual and imaginative isolation characteristic of
the act of reading constitutes a key element of our conception of modern, liberal
individuals undertaking activities for their own pleasure outside the domestic
sphere. Focusing on works by Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas from the 1870s
and 1880s, I consider how depictions of the act of reading disturb notions of
‘public’ and ‘private’ based on concepts of separate physical spaces. I suggest
that the image of reading is emblematic of a portable privacy the exercise of
which changes our perceptions of how individuals negotiated public and social
spaces in the nineteenth century. During this period, being in public, observing
the lives of strangers and reserving to oneself a separate, intimate sphere were
important elements of life in the metropolis, and also informed ideas of what
constituted both social and aesthetic ‘modernity’.1
