(London, 1962), p. 27.
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Sex and its nature might well attract doctors and biologists; but what was surprising and
difficult of explanation was the fact that sex – woman, that is to say – also attracts agreeable
essayists, light-fingered novelists, young men who have taken the M.A. degree; men who
have taken no degree; men who have no apparent qualification save that they are not women.
[…] It was a most strange phenomenon; and apparently – here I consulted the letter M – one
confined to the male sex. Women do not write books about men – a fact that I could not help
welcoming with relief, for if I had first to read all that men have written about women, then
all that women have written about men, the aloe that flowers once in a hundred years would
flower twice before I could set pen to paper.
19
Whether they were feminists or not, there were a great number of women using the Reading
Room in the 1920s and 1930s. One journalist referred rather condescendingly to ‘sweet girl
graduates, shingled and Russian-booted, [sitting] with their noses buried in hefty tomes’. No
doubt they were as capable of looking after themselves as their Victorian predecessors who
scorned the seats specially reserved for ladies. In 1882 a journalist remarked that these seats
were always left untenanted – and so in 1907 they were abolished.
An episode involving two women readers startled other users of the room in 1938. The
then Superintendent, a small rather cherubic-looking man, was greatly admired by two female
readers. On the occasion in question one of these ladies was engaging the Superintendent in
animated conversation, and the other became more and more enraged until, seething with fury,
she removed one of her sandals and belaboured her rival, while chasing her round the room.
(Superintendents were not always popular with readers. One lady took a great dislike to a
particular Superintendent, habitually referred to him as ‘the white rabbit’, and on one occasion
sent him what she described as an appropriate gift – a cabbage.)
The poet Louis MacNeice used the Reading Room in the 1930s, and in 1939 he wrote the
following lines:
Under the hive-like dome the stooping haunted readers
Go up and down the alleys, tap the cells of knowledge –
Honey and wax, the accumulation of years –
Some on commission, some for the love of learning,
Some because they have nothing better to do
Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden
The drumming of the demon in their ears.
Cranks, hacks, poverty-stricken scholars,
In pince-nez, period hats or romantic beards
And cherishing their hobby or their doom
Some are too much alive and some are asleep
Hanging like bats in a world of inverted values,
Folded up in themselves in a world which is safe and silent:
This is the British Museum Reading Room.
Out on the steps in the sun the pigeons are courting,
Puffing their ruffs and sweeping their tails or taking
A sun-bath at their ease
And under the totem poles – the ancient terror –
Between the enormous fluted Ionic columns
19
Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One’s Own
(London, 1929), pp. 35-7.
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eBLJ 2019, Article 5
There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces
The guttural sorrow of the refugees.
20
One of MacNeice’s fellow readers was a gentleman who claimed the throne of Poland, and
made a striking figure in the Reading Room in his voluminous cloak.
21
He still adorned the
Reading Room after the war, from which the room emerged damaged but basically sound.
It had survived the oil bomb which struck the dome in October 1940, and the incendiaries
which burned out the adjacent SW bookstack in May 1941. It was closed to readers from1940
because of the danger caused by the vast area of glass in the twenty great windows – a service
was provided in the North Library instead. Shrapnel from anti-aircraft shells peppered the
dome causing dozens of holes through which the rain filtered. After these had been repaired the
Reading Room was re-opened in June 1946.
In the following extract from his novel
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
