Books throw us into the world as much as they provide respite from it. Now that summer is here, I am reminded of the particular pleasure of lying reading on the grass. It’s a memory of adolescence, filled with sensuality: toes curled on to green softness; the sun, pulsing hot on bare legs; the book – Jane Eyre, or The God of Small Things perhaps – held aloft to keep glare off the face. But it also has an ethical charge. I was reading, as so many young women have read, to find out how to be a strong woman in an oppressive world, how to channel anger and let it take me outwards, away from the pettiness of family squabbles; how to allow the body’s needs and wants to play out without shame.
Think of Jane Eyre herself. The novel begins with Jane poring over Thomas Bewick’s The History of British Birds, reading her way to the bleak shores of Lapland and Siberia and into centuries of winters, “happy at least in my way”, glad to be able to imaginatively escape the oppression of the present, where her aunt and cousin torment her. When her cousin John comes upon her and chides her for reading the family’s books (“They are mine”), she gains confidence from having read about the Romans to pit her spirit against his: “You are like a murderer–you are like a slave-driver–you are like the Roman emperors!!”
