Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf

Abstract

For the scholar engaged in solitary writing or research, library reading rooms are a welcome home-from-home: part club, part office and part retreat. These spaces provide a mixture of uninterrupted time for individual study, and sociable interactions between like-minded friends and colleagues. Bernstein's imaginatively rendered study of women users of the Round Reading Room in the British Museum in the latter half of the nineteenth century – and into the twentieth – investigates this intersection of public and private activities. In so doing, she complicates the binary between ‘interiority’ and what she calls ‘exteriority’, or ‘the public, social spaces where women could meet, conduct research, find mentors, and inspire and learn from one another’ (p. 1), in an era when female access to traditional higher education remained limited. Bernstein's striking book ‘argues against conventions of prizing interiority’ in studies of women's reading and women's literary activity, and indeed in acts of reading and writing more generally; she demonstrates how this ‘roomscape’ reveals ‘the mutually constitutive roles of exteriority and interiority’ (p. 3). Bernstein uses archival evidence from the British Museum Signature Book and Reading Room Applications, among other sources, to show that the rotunda of the Round Reading Room was not an environment in which women failed to flourish, in contradiction to the ‘oppressively patriarchal bell-jar atmosphere’ described by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One's Own. For Bernstein, the Round Reading Room reveals ‘the public and social dimensions of literary production’ (p. 1), in which the British Museum is a central node on ‘a larger network’ (p. 2). Bernstein writes women readers back into the history of the late-Victorian Reading Room in a lively and original way, and reveals the role of physical proximity in female literary network-building.