The Woman Reader

"[W]omen readers have long been associated with sexual illicitness and moral degeneration, and male readers with power and authority." The vivacious prose of this cultural history of the figure of the woman reader is its own recommendation. Jack's somewhat overstuffed volume (after George Sand: A Woman's Life Writ Large) examines the fraught history of the reading woman in (for the most part) the western world. This book is nothing if not compendious, which is the source of both its charm and its folly. Individual essays, which cover the figure of the woman reader from the classical world to the medieval cloister to the contemporary book club, are often powerfully argued, and Jack's ambition is praiseworthy. But the breadth of the canvas overwhelms: the book moves from one piece of evidence to another at a breathless pace in order to accelerate enough to reach the next century (any of the chapters would, extended, make a fine book in its own right). Accordingly, some of the claims here feel less culturally particular and temporally anchored than they might. "Admiration for women who read and wrote coexisted with anxieties about their effects in myriad different cultures," she writes. It's a point well worth making, but phrased in such a way as to make it seem an inevitable generality. (June)