A Good Read

"People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading", said the essayist and critic Logan Pearsall Smith, and the pleasure of reading has been much celebrated.

In 1859, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell was contemplating the books she was planning to read. "I have not had time yet. But I look at them as a child looks at a cake - with glittering eyes and watering mouth." A few decades later, George Gissing noted his frustration: "The misery of having no time to read a thousand glorious books."

It is of course possible to overdo any pleasure. "I have too much indulged my sedentary humour and have been a rake in reading" confessed Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in 1759.

Novel-reading in particular (despite a spirited defence by Jane Austen) has often been a little suspect. "Fred's studies are not very deep...he is only reading a novel" says Rosamond Vincy of her brother in George Eliot's Middlemarch.

In the 20th century, one of Evelyn Waugh's characters, Lady Peabury, is found "in the morning room reading a novel; early training gave a guilty spice to this recreation, for she had been brought up to believe that to read a novel before luncheon was one of the gravest sins it was possible for a gentlewoman to commit".

Perhaps she should have comforted herself with a reflection from G. K. Chesterton: "Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."

Wondering what to read next? Why not turn to Oxford's Good Fiction Guide for inspiration.

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