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La Terre (1887), Tirano Banderas (1926). These reconsiderations were not new. As early as the fourteenth
century, the Spanish writer Juan Ruiz, arch-priest of Hita, in his Libro de buen amor (The Book of Loving
Well), had subverted the convention in which a poet or lonely knight meets a beautiful shepherdess whom
he gently seduces, by having the narrator encounter in the hills of Guadarrama four wild, burly and
headstrong shepherdesses. The first two rape him, he escapes from the third by falsely promising to
marry her, while the fourth offers him lodging in exchange for clothes, jewels, a wedding or hard cash.
Two hundred years later, there were few such as the elderly Mr. Challis, who still believed in the symbolic
appeal of the loving shepherd and his shepherdess, or in the amorous gentleman and the innocent
country maiden. According to the author of The History of Reading, this is one of the ways (extreme, no
doubt) in which readers preserve and retell the past.
Several chapters, in different parts of the book, address the duties of fiction as opposed to what the
reader accepts as fact. The chapters on reading fact are a touch dry, ranging from the theories of Plato to
the criticisms of Hegel and Bergson; even though these chapters feature the possibly apocryphal
fourteenth-century English travel writer Sir John Mandeville, they are somewhat too dense to lend
themselves to summary. The chapters on reading fiction, however, are more concise. Two opinions,
equally prescriptive and utterly opposed, are set forth. According to one, the reader is meant to believe in
and act like the characters in a novel. According to the other, the reader must dismiss these characters as
mere fabrications with no bearing whatsoever on “the real world”. Henry Tilney, in Jane Austen’s
Northanger Abbey, voices the first opinion when he interrogates Catherine after the breaking off of her
friendship with Isabella; he expects her feelings to follow the conventions of fiction:
“You feel, I suppose, that, in losing Isabella, you lose half yourself: you feel a void in your heart which
nothing else can occupy. Society is becoming irksome; and as for the amusements in which you were wont
to share at Bath, the very idea of them without her is abhorrent. You would not, for instance, now go to a
ball for the world. You feel that you have no longer any friend to whom you can speak with unreserve; on
whose regard you can place dependence; or whose counsel, in any difficulty, you could rely on. You feel all
this?”
“No,” said Catherine, after a few moments’ reflection, “I do not — ought I?”
The reader’s tone and how it affects the text are discussed in Chapter Fifty-one, through the character of
Robert Louis Stevenson reading stories to his neighbours in Samoa. Stevenson attributed his sense of the
dramatic and the music of his prose to the bedtime stories of his childhood nurse, Alison Cunningham,
“Cummie”. She read him ghost stories, religious hymns, Calvinist tracts and Scottish romances, all of
which eventually found their way into his fiction. “It’s you that gave me the passion for the drama,
Cummie,” he confessed to her as a grown man. “Me, Master Lou? I never put foot inside a playhouse in
my life.” “Ay woman,” he answered. “But it was the grand dramatic way ye had of reciting the hymns.”
Stevenson himself did not learn to read until the age of seven, not out of laziness but because he wanted
to prolong the delights of hearing the stories come to life. This our author calls “the Scheherazade
syndrome”.
Reading fiction is not our author’s only preoccupation. The reading of scientific tracts, dictionaries, parts
of a book such as indexes, footnotes and dedications, maps, newspapers — each merits (and receives) its
own chapter. There is a short but telling portrait of the novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who every
morning reads a couple of pages of a dictionary (any dictionary except the pompous Diccionario de la
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