Lecture examines a book at bedtime

An exploration of the pleasures and pitfalls of curling up with a good book, particularly for female readers past and present, formed the foundation of the inaugural lecture by Professor Hermione Lee, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature, and a Fellow of New College. Professor Lee is pictured, left. Juxtaposing private with public reading (or in other words `vertical and horizontal' reading), Professor Lee charted the thrill of illicit page-turning in her lecture, entitled `Reading in bed'. Women's secret devouring of books has long been held as a dangerous habit, reviled as both unhealthy and unfeminine. While reading aloud could, just about, be tolerated, a women's solitary reading was testimony to her sloth and selfishness, with reading in bed a particular target for criticism. Therefore the female bookworm had to exhibit cunning in procuring reading material, and finding somewhere to indulge in the transgressional pastime. In Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir, Julien Sorel is intrigued by Mathilde de la Mole's purloining of books from her father's library, and sneaking them back to the privacy of her own room. According to Professor Lee, the place of reading, and exactly how one does it, is inextricably linked to the pleasure of the act: witness Jo in Little Women, Maggie Tulliver in Mill on the Floss, and Jane Eyre who each find a special place in which to indulge themselves. Until recently the sanctioned place of reading was the library or study—a traditionally male-dominated room in the house. Professor Lee observed that while Dr Johnson might have counselled `turn your daughters loose in the library', the opposite view was widely held. After all, the reading woman was a woman who was foregoing her domestic duties. As well as a sanctioned room, there were (and according to a recent Italian survey still are) preferred postures for reading: at a desk, sitting—not lounging, sprawling, or reading in bed. Many authors, including A.S. Byatt, Margaret Attwood, and Eudora Welty, have drawn upon their own childhood delight in reading forbidden material, or reading beneath the sheets when they should have been sleeping. However, as Professor Lee commented at the end of her lecture, the serendipitous approach to reading advocated by Virginia Woolf—even reading while doing something other—seemed to do her no harm.