About

Scholars of reading in nineteenth century France have looked at the history of novel reading, but not specifically how women engaged with books as consumer products. Meanwhile, historians of consumption in nineteenth century France have looked at gendered consumption practices (especially around interiors, fashion and furniture) but rarely the consumption of print culture. This project unites theses literatures by investigating contemporary perceptions of female book consumption through visual advertising sources, literary and visual sources, and by reconstructing the experience of reading using egodocuemnts (letters, memoirs, dairies, autobiographies). It will also use a range of newspaper sources authored by or about women, as well as materials relating to the introduction of obligatory primary education (1881-1882) in order to further assess how female book consumption was perceived. The central research question of this project will be how far reading practices amongst women and girls changed as book consumption grew at an unprecedented rate.

It will do this by asking how women and girls' reading was imagined and represented through various reading spaces. This interdisciplinary use of spatial approaches will engage with the concept of Bovarysme that Auslander (1996) notably develops in her work on gendered consumption practices in the French Second Empire. According to this, consumption amongst women was a means of individuation and escapism. This project will assess whether there is an intensification of Bovarysme approaching the fin-de-siècle, or if indeed this concept holds descriptive power in relation to female reading practices in the 1870s and 1880s. My work will also contribute to debates in book history around contemporary attitudes to the health effects of reading on men and women, responding to this literature with a comparative perspective on female readers around themes of health, gender identity and intellectualism. The highest book production level on record in France before the 1960s was during the decade 1889-1899 (Darnton, 1990). By considering the rise of the book as a consumer product, this project will contextualize and interpret the everyday experience of reading for French women and girls in the early Third Republic.