1. I would also suggest that the image of the woman reader has a deep cultural resonance in the visual arts. Despite, or maybe because of, women’s readership being “belittled” (A. G. Berggren, “Reading Like a Woman,” in Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response, ed. P. P. Schweickart and E. A. Flynn [New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2004], p. 168)
2. Stefan Bollmann’s survey of visual and artistic representations of Reading Women (London: Merrell, 2006).
3. A. Manguel, The History of Reading (Bath: Bath Press, 1996).
4. The majority of the Smithton women were married, with children under the age of 18, living in the suburbs, with 42 percent in full-or part-time employment, while 38 percent were full-time housewives (J. A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991 (1984)], pp. 50–59).
5. See, for example, G. Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: Flamingo, HarperCollins, 1993 [1970]: 192–212)