Introduction: books, reading and libraries in fiction

The above extracts from one of the best-known fictional encounters with a book establish several features about the representation of books, reading and libraries in fiction that the chapters in this volume seek to address. The opening chapter of Jane Eyre (1847) has been subjected to numerous critical analyses.² Its richness lies not only in the way it immediately links the act of reading with the construction of narrative identity, establishing a motif that will be sustained throughout the novel, but in the way it captures in a short space the ‘where’, ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ of books and reading. For Jane, taking possession of a book and reading it is at once transgressive, escapist, empowering and dangerous. Her encounter with Bewick’s History of British Birds excites both her desire for knowledge – the ‘introductory pages’ are not wholly rendered ‘blank’ by her page skimming – and her imagination: the adult Jane links the childhood experience to both her ‘understanding’ and her evolving ‘feelings’. Yet the materiality of the book is also important. Jane’s interest in the pictures is contrasted, not to the words and their meaning, but to the typography – the ‘letterpress’ – the physical marks that her eyes encounter on the page. Then, as the victim of John Reed’s abuse, the book as a physical object takes over the scene. John’s hurling of it is a barbaric expression of his right of ownership over books he himself has never read. Books are a marker of class division, yet the extent of the family library – confined to a small breakfast room – renders John’s snobbish pronouncement about ‘gentlemen’s children’ (ch. 1, p. 42) redundant. Finally, the scene demonstrates how Jane has access to the most transformative aspect of a book – its contents. She is able to combat John’s violence with her learning, hurling back words culled from her reading, the ideas already reimagined in relation to her own life and subjugation.

Fictional encounters with books, then, involve and signify more than just reading. The chapters in this volume pick up on these and other associations of books, reading and libraries as they are depicted in a selection of fictional narratives from the medieval period to the twenty-first century. Although the volume has a wide chronological span, it is not designed as a historical survey of the topic – a vast undertaking – but instead offers a set of case studies that, while focused on individual authors and genres from specific periods, can prompt ways of thinking across history and across different kinds of writing. The authors deploy or reference a variety of critical approaches, including intertextuality, hermeneutical phenomenology, information literacy, and the history of the book and reading. Each chapter is alert to the significance of literary form and how fiction, by referencing and performing acts of reading, ‘stages its own metafictional debates’, as Abigail Williams puts it in her contribution. Two distinctive features emerge. Firstly, the chapters repeatedly show how fictional encounters with books involve more than just the processes and consequences of reading. The various ways in which characters use and interact with books – from falling asleep with them to destroying and creatively reusing them for different purposes – forms a hitherto unrecognised or underappreciated part of fictional narratives. Secondly, and relatedly, the chapters demonstrate how attention to bibliographical forms and the material parts of books, as these are depicted in fictional works, reveals new ways of thinking about literary form and the social and ideological aspects of narrative.

Any study of the representation of books and reading within works of fiction must engage with two related fields or topics of enquiry: the history of reading and intertextuality. Scholarly interest in the history of reading takes as its focus historical evidence of the reading habits of real people, sometimes to indicate reception of a work, often to shed light on an intellectual’s thought processes.³ The essays assembled in the path-breaking collection The Practice and Representation of Reading address different ‘modes of reading that obtained in the past’ in an effort to map not only how reading was practised but ‘the meanings attached to it’.⁴ Documentary evidence of readerly engagement with texts through marginalia, records of ownership, and personal testimonies, have allowed scholars to discuss individual and group interactions with books and libraries, and the manner of reading. The need to move beyond documentation to consider the ‘meanings attached’ to reading offers a route into this wider field for studies of fictional representations of books.⁵ Portrayals of imagined readers and reading do not simply reflect, amplify, or distort contemporary cultural anxieties or moral debates, they form part of those anxieties and debates themselves. Works of fiction mediate and interpret books, libraries and the act of reading to their own readers, creating a form of reception theory. While this volume does not concern itself directly with actual readers, the relationship between historical attitudes towards books and reading and their treatment in fiction is a central concern, as, for example, in Rahel Orgis’s examination of the depiction of women’s reading programmes in two early modern texts in relation to historical evidence of women’s book ownership and libraries, and Shafquat Towheed’s discussion of Ivan Turgenev’s novella Faust (1855) in the context of critical discourse on the rise of literacy and popular reading in the 1850s.

Encounters with books, reading and libraries as discussed in this volume are connected to, but nevertheless distinct from, the matter of literary allusion and intertextuality. At the very end of Jane Eyre, the narrating heroine likens St John Rivers to ‘the warrior Greatheart’, sealing the evident structural parallel Jane has built between her own narrative and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). As Sandra M. Gilbert notes, in her use of Bunyan Brontë was ‘typical of many nineteenth-century novelists who – from Thackeray to Louisa May Alcott – relied on his allegory to give point and structure to their own fiction’.⁶ Jane encounters and names many books during the course of her narrative, but while she has evidently read it, Pilgrim’s Progress is not one of them. Quotation, allusion, parody and structural parallels between texts are the substance of intertextuality and intertextual criticism. The chapters in this volume touch inevitably on such matters but the immediate concerns are both more specific and more wide-ranging. Two further examples of texts that allude directly to Pilgrim’s Progress illustrate the point. Alcott’s Little Women (1868) parades its debt in the author’s preface, with its adaptation of Bunyan’s famous exhortation ‘Go, then, my little book’, and in its opening chapter, explicitly headed ‘Playing Pilgrims’.⁷ The March sisters had played at the events of Christian’s journey towards salvation when they were younger; now they are instructed by their mother to ‘begin again, not in play, but in earnest’ (ch. 1, p. 18). Their subsequent progress in life is framed in terms of Bunyan’s allegory as the chapter headings – ‘Beth Finds the Palace Beautiful’, ‘Amy’s Valley of Humiliation’, ‘Meg Goes to Vanity Fair’ and so on – make clear. The Christmas gift of individual copies of a book – conceivably Pilgrim’s Progress but more likely the New Testament – bound in different colours is to serve as their ‘guide’. Yet although Mrs March, in a letter, notes approvingly of the ‘well-worn cover’ of Jo’s ‘guide-book’ (ch. 12, p. 101), the sisters’ embrace of their gift books assumes subtextual importance. Leaving aside the identity of the text, its status as a possession is subordinated to its assumed influence on their moral education.

John Buchan’s Mr Standfast (1919), while equally explicit in its debt to Bunyan’s allegory in its title and narrative structure, works differently.⁸ In Buchan’s novel the physical copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress that Richard Hannay is forced to acquire so that he can decipher codes and interpret letters from his contacts serves a dual narrative purpose. While the content of ‘the honest old story’ acts as a spiritual guide for Hannay in his equally ‘earnest’ wartime mission, the book itself is one of his ‘working tools’, one that supports the mechanics of the adventuring, or spy, genre.⁹ Reading and bibliographical form assume a vital importance in the unfolding of the story’s codes. Hannay knows that his room has been rifled when he notices his bookmark has been removed, and he is careful to acquire the same edition as his contacts – ‘the one in the Golden Treasury series’ – so that lineation and pagination match up.¹⁰

The chapters in this volume are concerned with similar encounters with the material book and intratextual depictions of actual reading, moving beyond the immediate theoretical implications of intertextual allusion to consider how such encounters contribute to genre conventions and refract social, cultural and ideological discourses on reading. In this context, the text that inevitably looms large is Don Quixote (1605–15), the quintessential symbol of the misguided reader who ‘became so convinced in his imagination of the truth of all the countless grandiloquent and false inventions he read that for him no history in the world was truer’.¹¹ Depictions of actual books and reading in Don Quixote form only a small part of the narrative. When the priest and the barber encounter Quixote’s library, containing ‘more than a hundred large volumes, very nicely bound, and many other smaller ones’, most of these makers of ‘mischief’, as they are referred to, are flung out of the window by the housekeeper and later burned.¹² Don Quixote – like many of the narratives it inspired – is concerned more with the consequences of reading that has already taken place, underpinning Cervantes’s immediate intention of parodying medieval romance and questioning literary form.¹³

As has been shown, the influence of Don Quixote on literature of the long eighteenth century was pervasive.¹⁴ In particular, the image of the female reader who ‘reads in the wrong way, and chaotically and corporeally reproduces her reading’ became a recurrent character type.¹⁵ In such novels the activity of reading as well as the nature of the books consumed becomes important. Scholarly accounts of women readers in the period have discussed fictional representations alongside contemporary discourse on reading, such as that contained in conduct books and historical evidence of actual reading practices. Jacqueline Pearson, for example, has shown how discourse on women’s reading – especially of novels and romances – was frequently associated with danger and sexual transgression, and how fictional female readers – like Cervantes’s Quixote – were portrayed as dangerously inclined to over-identify with characters and situations, and to confuse story with reality.¹⁶ However, the dominant view that women readers were in need of discipline and guidance in their choice of reading has been challenged by critics like Joe Bray, who argues that fiction of the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ‘frequently represents the female reader not as passive and impressionable, but rather as active and creative’.¹⁷ Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) is a case in point. The eponymous heroine, who reads both for education and personal pleasure, confidently asserts in the face of pressure from the pointedly named Mrs Freke, that ‘I read that I may think for myself.’ Mrs Freke maintains that books ‘spoil the originality of genius’ and ‘when one has made up one’s opinions, there is no use in reading’.¹⁸ For Belinda, however, reading is a way of negotiating the world around her on her own terms. Several chapters in this volume add to this revisionary scholarship by reassessing the identification of the female reader as quixotic misreader in texts spanning the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. In her reading of prose narratives by Margaret Cavendish and Delarivier Manley, Rahel Orgis shows how in each text what superficially looks like an endorsement of early modern commonplaces regarding the dangers of reading turns out to be a more complicated comment on received ideas. Reading the narratives against contemporary discourses on reading and conduct, Orgis shows how the acquisition of knowledge through reading affords agency to these women readers, enabling them to resist the dangers arising from the ‘ideal’ reading programmes imposed upon them by patriarchal societies. One of the striking findings of this chapter is the way Cavendish’s heroine identifies different kinds of books as valuable for her learning, among them mathematical books – ‘to demonstrate truth by reason’ – and play books – for ‘discover[ing] and express[ing] the humours and manners of men’. The selection is perhaps surprising, yet as Orgis further shows, play books and play-going could be identified in contemporary discourse as sound educational source material rather than morally dangerous activities. Abigail Williams picks up on this point in her chapter, which discusses instances of communal reading in a selection of eighteenth-century novels. Showing how the valorisation of reading in sociable domestic settings can be understood in the context of moral arguments about the dangers of solitary reading, Williams concludes with an analysis of the famous depiction of domestic performance in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), demonstrating how Sir Thomas Bertram’s disapproval at his family’s attempt at amateur theatricals neatly frames the period’s moral concerns about how to read at home.

Both of these chapters show how intratextual depictions of reading provoke a self-referential engagement with fictional forms. As Kate Flint argues, ‘representations of reading act as a comment on the status of the text in which such a reference is found’ and ‘emphasizes the compliance, or otherwise of this text with established conventions concerning both fictional form and the response of readers’.¹⁹ In her discussion of Cavendish in particular, Orgis considers the implications of the text’s negotiation of its own genre characteristics. The heroine’s choices and preferences in reading are complicated by their relation to the genre of the text in which she is emplotted. Monika Class also explores this theme in her discussion of one of the best-known depictions of what she terms the ‘intradiegetic novel reader’: Austen’s Northanger Abbey, published in 1818 but written in the late 1790s. Austen’s defence of novels and her refusal to undermine her own composition by presenting a negative portrayal of novel-reading are explored through the framework of hermeneutical phenomenology. Class shows how, in contrast to earlier eighteenth-century depictions of novel-reading, Austen departs from the dominant pathologisation of quixotism by integrating novels into a respectable part of character formation.

Fiction of the Victorian period was equally preoccupied with the image of the woman reader. Along with Jane Eyre, Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Isobel Archer in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1891) are among many works that depict central female characters as readers.²⁰ As Carla L. Peterson has shown, the motif of reading in such novels is central to the creation of character. For orphaned or outcast protagonists like Jane Eyre, reading represents ‘as it did for earlier cultures, an attempt to discover their true identity, to trace origins and genealogy’.²¹ Jane’s consumption of ‘such books as came in my way’ (ch. 13, p. 155) – from the opening encounter with Bewick’s British Birds, Gulliver’s Travels, Arabian Tales, the Bible, Schiller, the German grammar and dictionary which she uses to teach herself the language, Walter Scott’s ‘Marmion’ and ‘the abundant harvest of entertainment and information’ she discovers in the ‘volumes of light literature, poetry, biography, travels [and] a few romances’ (ch. 11, pp. 134–5) contained in the one unlocked bookcase in Rochester’s library – form a programme of self-education and a process of self-realisation. The parting image of her reading is one of empowerment and harmony with the blind Rochester, who ‘saw books through me … Never did I weary of reading to him’ (ch. 38, p. 476).

Unlike Jane, for whom ‘the finding of self through the reading of books is an achievable goal’, as Peterson avers, Isobel Archer’s reading in The Portrait of a Lady can be viewed as the opposite of self-realisation.²² Like Jane, Isobel’s reading is furtive: her reading room is ‘a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library’ – a sanctuary in which she deliberately isolates herself from the outside world, refusing to look out of the door that opens onto the street ‘for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side’.²³ Also like Jane, her choice of books is eclectic – Browning, George Eliot, the Spectator and German philosophy – but, the narrator suggests, her ‘uncontrolled use of a library full of books’ is ‘laid in the idleness of her grandmother’s house’ (ch. 3, p. 40). Unguided reading fails to equip this pretty young woman for an education in life – especially the fashionable life of London and Florence. Her love of knowledge has ‘a fertilising quality and her imagination was strong’ (ch. 3, p. 38), but like the quixotic readers of earlier periods, she mistakenly bases her knowledge of the world on what she reads, eager to discover whether life in England ‘corresponded with the descriptions in the books’ (ch. 6, p. 73). As the novel progresses, and her determined attempt to shape her own destiny falters, Isobel’s appetite for reading declines. She becomes the portrait of a distracted, impotent reader, ‘fretting the edge of her book with a paper-knife’ (ch. 29, p. 333).

Fictional readers in nineteenth-century novels, quixotic or otherwise, are not, of course, exclusively female. In Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), Julien Sorel’s ‘mad craze for reading’ (as it appears to his illiterate father) moulds his ambitions and his love affairs, his ‘manual of conduct’ initially consisting of Rousseau’s Confessions and the exploits of Napoleon in Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. Julien comes to view his life as a novel he has composed himself: ‘At last, he said to himself, my romantic story reaches its conclusion, and the credit is in the end all mine.’²⁴ In the French tradition, however, the novel most associated with intratextual reading is Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), the depiction of a female Quixote whose excessive and uncontrolled reading leads her to confuse fiction with reality and to die disillusioned by her impossible aspirations.²⁵ Flaubert’s text was influential enough for Mary Braddon to rework the essential details of the plot in her sensation novel The Doctor’s Wife (1864). Both works raise the issue of negative representations of reading, a topic explored by Shafquat Towheed in his chapter on Ivan Turgenev’s Faust, a novella published two years before Madame Bovary. Picking up on earlier chapters in the volume, Towheed is concerned with the inherent paradox arising from the depiction within works of fiction of negative responses or resistance to reading fiction. As his close analysis of Turgenev’s text demonstrates, such questions turn on the ‘how’ as much as the ‘what’ of reading. Placing the work within the context of the cultural anxieties and moral panics surrounding rising literacy and the growth of the reading public in Britain and Russia in the 1850s, Towheed shows how reading skilfully and critically were afforded a new prominence, one circumscribed by increasing prohibition and control.²⁶

Hannah Callahan’s chapter on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) picks up on the topics of literacy and critical reading. Building on a recent strain of criticism, Callahan argues that Dracula is as much a novel about books, information and reading as it is about vampires. Like readers today, the characters in Dracula are confronted with a bewildering array of information in different documentary forms. Written forms of communication are essential but open to misuse. Drawing on modern rubrics of information literacy, Callahan shows how the text challenges the characters’ easy confidence in the authority of books and written records and promotes socially conscious forms of reading and dissemination of knowledge. The narrative form of Dracula makes the novel especially conducive to this approach. Constructed as an archive of documents and letters, it demands that readers outside the text employ a critical awareness about information equal to that of the readers inside the text.

Other chapters in the book are similarly concerned with connections between reading, interpretation and the material form of books and documents. In his chapter on envisioned reading in late medieval dream narratives, Daniel Sawyer shows how the tradition of reading followed by visionary experience often involves an active engagement with the material book. Portrayals of embodied reading and the physical identification of reader and book encourages us to ‘imagine a material quality of the book described’. The depiction, for example, of a world of ‘flexibles quires’ in Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid and of ‘notes and scraps of written material’ at the conclusion of The Kingis Quair (attributed to James I of Scotland) allows Sawyer (like Callahan) to link the depiction of fluid, mobile reading, engineered by these different material forms and transformed into dream visions, to modern platforms of reading and consuming information.

The materiality of the book is central to Lucy Sixsmith’s chapter, which explores Sue Bridehead’s New Testament in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). As a book made up of books, the Bible’s history as a material object is conspicuously fluid. Sue has recreated her own New Testament by cutting up a bound volume and rearranging the separate ‘books’ into their chronological order of composition. Situating her discussion within the context of Victorian Bibles as material objects, Sixsmith argues that this apparent act of destruction, easily dismissed as sacrilege, can be viewed conversely as constructive in various ways. Jude is ‘a novel full of books and reading’, and Sue’s creative engagement with the material and intellectual form of her Testament forms part of the work’s preoccupation with class and education. Excluded from the college walls of Christminster (that is, Oxford), her cutting and rearranging of the volume can be viewed as an alternative form of Bible translation, a stark alternative to Jude’s scholarly Greek text. Sixsmith’s own reconstruction of Sue’s reconstruction shows what can be gained by taking seriously the manual and intellectual work involved in Sue’s remaking. What characters do with books, to invoke Leah Price, is as important a signifier as actual reading.²⁷

Sawyer makes a pertinent observation in his chapter when he notes that ‘the word read and its cognates do not, in their origins, assume contact with writing. They originate in a verb for interpretation and counsel’. In her chapter on D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1907) Susan Watson shows how depictions of reading – especially communal or shared reading – are linked to the interpretation of character. The realist strain in this early Lawrence novel is evident in the way reading serves as a signifier of class or social status. As Watson notes, Sons and Lovers can be read in the context of self-education movements of the late nineteenth century. Her chapter moves beyond this, however, to show how the reading of books is presented not only as an index to individual characters, but as an index to the relationships between them. Episodes where one character reads aloud to another are a staging of the way each character reads or interprets the other; and in the interiority of Lawrence’s narrative, they become an indication of their receptivity towards each other’s personality.

The final four chapters in the book are concerned with individual genres. Each chapter demonstrates how the depiction of books and reading contribute to genre characteristics as much as they are conditioned by them. Andrew Nash’s account of Victorian adventure fiction shows how books and reading have surprisingly important functions in a genre that explicitly rejects the domestic environment for outdoor activity and rhetorically elevates oral forms of storytelling above the printed word. Elements of the discussion pick up threads from other chapters: Robert Louis Stevenson’s association of reading with dreams, for example, can be linked to Daniel Sawyer’s discussion of envisaged reading in medieval dream visions, and the function of books and texts as clues to mysteries can be compared to detective fiction, the subject of Keith Manley’s chapter. Most strikingly, as in Lucy Sixsmith’s account of Sue Bridehead, the discussion shows how a concern with the materiality of books and texts underpins the most salient aspects of the genre: in Haggard’s case the textual instantiation and recycling of myth and legend, in Stevenson’s the complexity of duty and moral action.

Karen Attar’s chapter on the twentieth-century girls’ school story is also concerned with a genre which in its setting and valorisation of community activity would appear on the surface to be inhospitable to reading. Attar shows how one of the most successful and prolific writers of such stories turns reading into a social activity to render it acceptable within the genre. Tropes of misreading, of identification and over-identification with characters, of the importance of guidance when reading, and of the differentiation between good and bad books exist in Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School series as in earlier books for adults, with one important twist. Brent-Dyer expects and invites her child readers to identify with the heroines of her books, and uses her characters’ reading as an educational guide of what and how to read – with an eye to the adult approvers and purchasers of the books she is writing.

Keith Manley’s encyclopaedic chapter on ‘Golden Age’ detective fiction traces the many ways in which books and libraries fuel the plots of Agatha Christie and her contemporaries.²⁸ Manley shows how the library is more than just a convenient setting for the bodies of crime fiction – a way of upsetting the ordered rhythm of life in the average village (the ubiquitous setting for so many detective novels of the period). As repositories of knowledge, the contents of libraries can aid the detective in unlocking the secret to a crime. More intricately, it is the library’s sense of order that adds to its richness as a tool in a genre that turns on deception and disclosure. As Manley shows, in several examples it is the disruption of this order that offers the clue to the crime – a hidden murder weapon, a misplaced volume, a disguised safe or secret passage.

The concept of the library is critical to Jane Suzanne Carroll’s account of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Series, a chapter that brings this volume full circle in its treatment of fantasy narratives. Pratchett’s use of precise bibliographical terminology and library typology to describe ‘L-space’, a quantum space wherein all books and book collections are connected, signals ‘the power of books to manipulate the fabric of reality’. As Carroll argues, images of movable type and the making of books underline how books (and knowledge) are ‘not immutable or permanent but are composed of moving parts’, and so ‘open to the possibilities of various, varied, and variable readings’. The mutable nature of books discloses the complexity of authority, truth and power in Pratchett’s fictional universe.

In different ways, then, the final two chapters emphasise the importance of the library as a theme within fiction. The portrayal of libraries in literature is a vast subject, and this volume only touches the surface.²⁹ Nevertheless, a concluding discussion of the topic is warranted here as a means of addressing some of the areas not covered in the volume. The physical edifice of the library has proved an especially rich resource for works of fiction. Libraries are ideal places in which to set mysteries because the buildings, like the Bodleian Library noted by Manley, may well be familiar landmarks, yet much of what goes on inside them is arcane. The very buildings are impenetrable to many, privileging those of a particular gender or class, and the book stacks inaccessible to all, allowing the imagination to run rife. When Adam Appleby, the comic hero of David Lodge’s The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965), becomes trapped in the stacks – the ‘entrails’ – of the museum library, he discovers a ‘dark underworld, heavy with the odour of decaying paper’. The ‘civilised spaciousness’ of the reading room, which instils in scholars ‘a quiet confidence that wisdom was at their fingertips’, is contrasted to ‘this cramped and gloomy warren’ which hides behind the library’s illusion of order.³⁰ The reading room in the old British Museum Library has been widely fictionalised.³¹ In Lodge’s novel it becomes a ‘huge womb’ within which scholars ‘curled themselves’, fetus-like, ‘more tightly over their books’ – an apt metaphor, for Appleby, a young Catholic, spends the novel despairing over the possible pregnancy of his wife.³² The image contrasts with that conjured up by Marion Yule in George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), who likens the readers trapped in their endless pursuit of learning as ‘hapless flies caught in a huge web, its nucleus the great circle of the Catalogue’.³³

The same features of entrapment, exclusivity and arcaneness render libraries a rich setting for ghost stories.³⁴ In Margaret Oliphant’s ‘The Library Window’ (1896), the narrator, who claims to ‘see all sorts of things’ while reading her book, perceives a male scholar working in a library through a window that appears from the street to be bricked up.³⁵ The spectral library and the scholar emerge as an exclusive domain out of reach of the unnamed girl who is spending her summer without her parents in a university town modelled on St Andrews. Academic settings pervade the stories of M. R. James, which are densely populated by references to books and libraries. ‘The Tractate Middoth’, one of his Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), is based around a book in the stacks of Cambridge University Library, containing a will; a library assistant encounters a ghost when going to fetch the book for an enquirer. Two barriers are at play here: limited access to the stacks, and, as Patrick J. Murphy has emphasised in his analysis of the story, women’s restricted access to the University Library at all.³⁶ Another tale, ‘Casting the Runes’, features the reading room of the British Museum Library, in which a vengeful writer hands a scholar a cursed piece of paper. (It is a sign of the murderer’s depravity that he tears a picture roughly from Bewick to send his intended victim as a warning; Harrington sells the copy of the book, with the mutilated page, after the murderer’s death.³⁷) In our own day, Sean O’Brien, who has openly set several short ghost stories in his collection The Silence Room (2008) in an amended version of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society Library, refers to this library’s redolence of M. R. James in the way it seems to float free in time, with its spiral staircase and mysterious doors and byways.³⁸

The depiction of books and libraries as a threshold to a dream or fantasy world has a long history, as Daniel Sawyer’s chapter on the late medieval period demonstrates. It is a common trope in children’s fantasy fiction, as, for example, in Michael Ende’s Die unendliche Geschichte (1979), translated as The Neverending Story (1983), where the protagonist Bastian Balthasar Bux steals a book from a second-hand bookshop and is drawn into its adventures which become the beginning of his.³⁹ A classic earlier example is Lilith (1895), the late masterpiece of George MacDonald, widely considered the father of modern fantasy. In this work, subtitled ‘A Romance’, the doorway between worlds is an ancient library ‘whose growth began before the invention of printing’, and whose space is visited by the ghost of an old librarian, Mr Raven.⁴⁰ Raven (who assumes the form of a bird in the fantasy world), moves between realms via a vault containing the oldest and rarest books, the door to which is disguised by a line of book backs made out of volumes that were ‘lost beyond hope of recovery.’⁴¹ On top of one of the shelves, fixed and seemingly unmoveable, lies a mutilated manuscript book written on parchment and bound in limp vellum. It is this volume, which has been cut through diagonally to complete the illusion of the book-backed door, that lures the narrator, Mr Vane, into the other world. The half-book obviously represents the liminal space between two worlds. What fragments of its contents Vane can detect from the turning up of one corner make no ‘sense’ to him, yet they awaken in him ‘impossible’ feelings, ‘new in colour and form’.⁴² As Stephen Prickett points out, there is a suggestion that ‘all books span this gap between external and internal worlds’,⁴³ yet it is significant too that the volume is a manuscript book sitting atop a row of printed volumes, forming a bridge between two worlds of book production.

If books and libraries are an essential dynamic in much fantasy fiction, references are sparser in science fiction (for all the difficulty in defining the genre).⁴⁴ Active hostility towards books is a token of the dystopian world of the genre. The threatening power of the written word is evident from desire to annihilate it, whether by systematically burning physical volumes in Ray Bradbury’s American classic Fahrenheit 451 (1953)⁴⁵ – ultimately hearteningly ineffectual, as rebels memorise the contents of books to keep them alive – or more subtly by narrowing vocabulary and hence gradually rendering the content incomprehensible, as Syme explains in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949):

By 2050 – earlier, probably – all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Milton, Byron – they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.⁴⁶

It is not the mere absence of books, but their systematic eradication, which renders these worlds so bleak and depraved. Be the settings humdrum or bizarre, the presence of books and libraries in fiction emphasises how integrated they are in society. And while certain titles may be unedifying, and untaught readers may read uncritically, books and reading are ultimately ennobling and redemptive. The new dimensions they open to readers are seldom as overt as they are in fantasy fiction but are nonetheless real. In fiction as in life, books, reading and libraries are integral to our humanity.