In the mid-1990s, with a new PhD and professorship in hand, I obtained a reader's ticket from the old Reading Room at the British Museum. Experiencing “archive fever” and disorientation in my first encounter with British call numbers, I was astounded by the Lilliputian hallways, charming nooks and crannies, and distribution of books from an underground cagelike edifice. The hovering ghosts of Marx and other past readers made me giddy. Being enveloped in the round womblike cocoon of the Reading Room provided space to earnestly read the manuscripts of the nineteenth-century writers I “follow” the way my students follow celebrity tweets.

Susan David Bernstein's new study, Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf, is a welcome and welcoming history and analysis of how reading and writing at the British Museum Reading Room was not just about having a private space for intense and intensely felt study. The Reading Room, in Bernstein's words, provided an “exteriority” that “brings its own pleasures and rewards” (194). That exteriority—the webs of friendship and mentorship that we now call “networking”—was crucial for the emerging cadre of nineteenth-century British professional women writers. For, if, as Derrida notes, “archive fever” is “to burn with a passion” and a “to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement,” it is something we academics, readers, and writers do together (quoted, 193). That togetherness, if you will, enables the very circulation of knowledge and texts. Of course, up until the twentieth century, most women were prohibited access to knowledge and texts, and so it is important to study where and how the archival web of knowledge was open to them.

In chapters on the nineteenth-century women who used the Reading Room for their translation work, research, and writing, Bernstein argues that the feminist belief that “public space” is “antithetical to writing women”—ergo, the woman writer needs “a room of one's own”—is contradicted by the material reality of the old British Museum Reading Room (1). Architecturally “both public and enclosed,” it offered an “egalitarian” space for women scholars, writers, and readers to meet, mentor, and inspire each other (1). Unlike the hierarchical London Library, the Reading Room—chiefly designed by the radical Antonio Panizzi—exhibits a democratic sense of space, where writers of all stripes, classes, and reputations (and sales figures) mingled together beneath the expansive dome. This was particularly helpful to women, who found generous female colleagues and male mentors inside the Reading Room walls, making it a “hub” for the many women claiming a right of passage into the public sphere (15).

The list of nineteenth-century female writers, translators, and scholars who used the Reading Room is breathtaking, especially because of the links among them. Christina Rossetti used the Reading Room for decades, seeking earlier women writers, just as Amy Levy sought “writing foremothers as well as a literary lineage of female figures” (85) by studying Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rossetti's work. Mathilde Blind wrote on George Eliot and Mary Robinson on Emily Brontë. Other women poets with reader's tickets include Michael Field, Vernon Lee, Adelaide Proctor, and Augusta Webster. In 1886 Olive Schreiner reports running into her friend Eleanor Marx, who “fairly danced with anger” at the Reading Room policy denying women access to the Kamasutra (quoted, 39). Eleanor Marx was a habitué of the Reading Room, working there on her translation of Madame Bovary and regularly meeting up with fellow translators Clementina Black and Constance Black Garnett, the latter introducing English-language readers to Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

Bernstein's last two chapters focus on George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. More theoretical than the rest of the study, these chapters make the case that though Eliot and Woolf each needed privacy in order to write, both were dependent upon the “public and enclosed” mix found at the Reading Room. Vexed at not being able to study arcane cinquecento matter for her novel Romola, Eliot and her “husband” and amanuensis Lewes frequented the Reading Room. Eliot depended on Emmanuel Deutsch and William Ralston, both of whom worked at the British Museum, for help in her reading preparatory to writing Romola and Daniel Deronda. Bernstein argues that in the round Reading Room Eliot experienced “dome consciousness,” defined as “a blistering blend of imagined surveillance and judgement of both her writing and her lifestyle,” making it difficult for Eliot to appreciate the networking relationships so many other women writers found at the Reading Room (120). At the same time, Eliot's research there helped to reimagine the very act of scholarly pursuit vis-à-vis gender and public/private space.

The final chapter argues that “dome consciousness” is central to Woolf's writing style, manifesting as it does the Reading Room's spatial democracy in written form. “Cartwheel formalism” typifies Woolf's writing, according to Bernstein, as Woolf “doodl[es] together ideas” in wide-ranging, seemingly disconnected fashion rather than creating “methodically reasoned argument” like the male reader “servilely following academic traditions” that blinker him from seeing the vastness of the archive that Woolf sees (157, 161). Woolf's method, says Bernstein, has much in common with the circular, democratic nature of the Reading Room, with its “tables arranged as spokes radiating out from the central card catalogues” (157).

Though I am not always convinced by the fascinating arguments about “dome consciousness” and “cartwheel formalism,” the sheer force of material reality described and analyzed by this astute, generous writer makes for rich, provocative reading. And it takes me back to my own gendered encounter with the democratic richness of the Reading Room.