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| photo: Edmund Blok | |
Abigail Williams is professor of 18th-century literature at the University of Oxford. She's published a series of books on 18th-century literary history, including The Social Life of Books. She's intrigued by how, why, and what we read--from the furor over the immorality of the novel in the 1700s, to identity politics and sensitivity readers in the 2020s. Reading It Wrong: An Alternative History of Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (Princeton University Press) is a history of all the ways in which books might have confused or bewildered their first readers.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Reading It Wrong is a new history of 18th-century literature showing the way books were dependent on imperfect readers and their muddle and confusion.
On your nightstand now:
I'm probably the last person I know who is reading Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall for the first time. But what a world she created! So rich and so immediate: I feel I'm in the room with them all. She's especially good at describing eyes, I think: Anne Boleyn's are shiny and black and "go click, click" like "an abacus."
Favorite book when you were a child:
I loved A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley. It's a time travel novel about a girl who slides out of her 20th-century world and into the tragedy of Mary, Queen of Scots. The fact that the little girl, Penelope, knows what's going to happen but can't alter it was a weirdly compelling new idea for me. And I learnt that in the olden days you could spell your name however you wanted, and I practised that a lot.
Your top five authors:
Nancy Mitford for the wit and fun--and total irreverence.
Rose Tremain for her luminous historical writing. There's so much hard-won research in there, but she manages to make you feel you are living it all yourself, in the court of 17th-century Sweden or 19th-century New Zealand gold mines.
Audre Lord, who channels ideas and anger with such pitch-perfect urgency.
James Rebanks, whose writing is personal and lyrical with a profound sense of place.
My grandmother wouldn't forgive me if I didn't include Ruth Rendell. Both of us read detective fiction and thrillers compulsively, so fast I don't always quite understand what's happened at the end.
Book you've faked reading:
Wolf Hall. But not anymore!
Book you're an evangelist for:
I keep buying friends The Assassin's Cloak, edited by Alan and Irene Taylor. It's an anthology of diary entries across time. Each day you get a snippet from that moment in someone else's life: Brian Eno talking about desperately trying to find batteries on Christmas Day for his kids' new toys, and how his urine looks like Pinot Grigio; Tolstoy; Kafka; Anne Frank. It's a perfect kaleidoscope of experiences.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Every Faber & Faber poetry volume I own. Those typographic book covers make me feel clever and cultured just by looking at them.
Book you hid from your parents:
Shirley Conran's Lace. We passed around copies of that racy '80s bonkbuster at my convent school. I think we believed we were reading about what being a grown-up woman was really like. Quite surprising to find out how wrong we were.
Book that changed your life:
Born to Run by Christopher McDougall. It starts from an author trying to find out how to run without getting hurt, and ends up in the Mexican Copper Canyons, with him watching people doing ultramarathons on three corn grains with old tyres strapped to their feet. I stopped buying expensive new trainers.
Favorite line from a book:
From George Eliot's Middlemarch: "Somebody put a drop [of Mr. Casaubon's blood] under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses." It's a good reminder of why scholars should avoid becoming pedants.
Five books you'll never part with:
Does an ordnance survey map of Dartmoor count? That, then Madhur Jaffrey's Ultimate Curry Bible. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway for the brilliant narrative patterning. Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, which is such a wonderfully comic gothic vision of rural living. George Eliot, Middlemarch. Big, rangy, ambitious yet intimate--it's a novel that speaks differently to me on every reading.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The first book I ever read on my own was by Enid Blyton. I was in my bedroom, and I didn't come down till I was halfway through. I'd love to recapture the magic of that first immersion.