Learning from fictional readers

Maria Nikolajeva

Two masters students this year wrote their theses about portrayal of readers and reading in children's books. They were not aware of each other's topics, nor did they know anything about the Reading Fictions project. Apparently it is an attractive topic. Masters students in children's literature are typically passionate readers. If you are a passionate reader you are likely to empathise with fictional readers. And you may wish to be like them. But it has its dangers, as Kim Reynolds pointed out last week.

The Russian national epic, Eugene Onegin, by Alexander Pushkin (better known in the West as an opera), which we had to endure in school just as English schoolchildren have to endure Shakespeare, features such a passionate reader. The thirteen-year-old female character, Tatiana, is technically what we would today call an adolescent, but socially no more so than the Bennet sisters, since she is available for marriage. Isolated at her parents' country home in the beginning of the 19^th century, she finds company in books, and her favourite author is Samuel Richardson. When we read Onegin in school, age thirteen, we had no idea about Richardson, who could just as well be a fictitious writer. Yet we were curious about the books, which the condescending narrator calls “dangerous” for young girls' imagination. To Pushkin's contemporaneous readers, Richardson's novels were well known and apparently represented bad taste suitable for sentimental young ladies, but equally misleading about harsh reality. The narrator states explicitly that Tatiana was diluded by “the fictions of the British muse”. She identifies with the novel heroines and imagines herself as one of them. As a fatal result, she falls in love with the neighbour gentleman, the cynical Onegin, writes him a love letter – as a romance heroine would – is rejected and marries the first best man who proposes to her. No happy endings in Russian classics.

As thirteen-year-old girls, we identified with Tatiana and imagined ourselves as her, with a firm belief that, unlike her, we would never be rejected by the object of our affection. Did we learn any more from books than Tatiana did?

Warning: reading may seriously damage your prospects in love

Kim Reynolds

One of my favourite ways to pass the time is listening to books while I cook. I am a great believer in reading aloud (itself a subject currently receiving some long overdue and interesting scholarly attention by historians) and love being read to whatever the circumstances. This month I was particularly pleased that Radio 4 dramatised "Sense and Sensibility" because for the forthcoming Reading Fictions conference I have been been mulling over how books present the relationship between reading and falling in love. Having an unexpectedly large number of cooking duties, I managed to hear the whole book. I hadn't re-read it for several years and was struck afresh by how, for much of modern history, women like Marianne Dashwood who read novels are regarded as unworthy objects of affection.
But perhaps it isn't quite as bad as that? Isn't it more the case that reading fiction is seen as juvenile, and growing up means leaving stories behind for more serious fare - but the effects of having read them make a woman more resourceful and better company in the long run? Think of Anne of Green Gables and the fine woman she becomes. And what of men? Marianne's romantic sensibilities are matched by Willoughby's who, like her, turns out to have more depths than at first seems possible.
My musings need to move into the twenty-first century, however, so I hope Radio 4 finds something suitable... Meanwhile,  I am going to test out the idea that early children's books that appear to disapprove of the effects of reading fiction on the formation of character and ideas about love in particular are less critical than they at first appear, and that these ideas are revolutionized in the twentieth century, when for a select group, at least, being an avid reader makes someone a prime contender in romantic contests.