The Woman Reader by Belinda Jack – review

Edith Wharton, brought up in a wealthy, unliterary "gilded age" family in the 1860s and 70s, was forbidden by her mother to read any novels until after she was married. This system of censorship, Wharton used to say, did her a great deal of good, as it forced her to read only "the classics": philosophy, history, poetry. Twenty years on in London, Virginia Woolf had a different kind of home education, reading her way through her father Leslie Stephen's library. "I am to re-read all the books Father has lent me." These (she was 15) were Carlyle, Scott, Macaulay, Hakluyt, Pepys, Montaigne, Gibbon and Shelley. "Reading four books at once," she often noted.

Neither Wharton nor Woolf went to school or university; both were omnivorous, self-educated readers. Both had their minds and characters shaped by the conditions of their early reading, by what their parents imposed on them, and by what was thought, in their environment, to be "good" and "bad" reading.

These case histories are not cited by Belinda Jack, who, in her book on women readers – which is, inevitably, also a book on women writers – covers palaeolithic wall-paintings to 21st-century reading-groups in 300 pages. So she can't include everything. But they are famous versions of a story that her book repeatedly tells, of the way that the woman reader has persisted and thrived under all kinds of conditions. Ambitions, strategies, arguments, bold moves, curiosity and desire have kept her going, for 40 centuries.

In A Room of One's Own, Woolf created a historical narrative of a few exceptional women reader-writers, resisting obstacles, censorship and lack of opportunity while many more women are silenced, such as Shakespeare's unfortunate imaginary sister, as great a genius as her brother, who comes to a tragic end. But that persuasive, influential story of the suppressed or derided woman reader has shifted dramatically in the near-century since A Room of One's Own was first published. Jack has done an impressive job of synthesising the scholarly work on book-history that has radically changed what we know about women's reading habits through the ages. In her thorough and informative book, she steadily demonstrates that the woman reader has not been nearly such an isolated or exceptional figure, historically, as was once thought.

She gives plenty of juicy and breath-taking examples of repression and mockery in any period you care to look at. Here goes: Juvenal, around 40AD, on ridiculous and repulsive female scholars. Philippe de Novare, in the early 13th century, on why girls shouldn't learn to read or write unless they are going to be nuns, "since they might write or receive amorous missives". A 1523 treatise saying that women are too frail and easily deceived – like Eve – to be teachers. Seventeenth-century Japanese advice books, illustrated by scenes of women copulating surrounded by books (one thing leads to another). The risks to women's health (convulsions, vapours) brought on by reading, described in an 18th-century French medical pamphlet. Advice from a Victorian London doctor on managing hysteria: watch the woman's mood as she is reading a novel, and, if it's troubling, distract her with "a book upon some practical subject, such, for instance, as bee-keeping". All point in the same direction, that "women's access to the written word has been a source of anxiety". Reading could lead to depravity, to independence, to uncontrollable secret thoughts, to an inability to distinguish between the real and the imaginary. The attitude persists into the modern world: at the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960, the chief prosecutor notoriously asked if it was a book you would "wish your wife or servant to read".

So the silencing and driving into hiding of women readers makes up a strong strand in the book, with its stories of women in the 14th century pretending to be illiterate in order to escape opprobrium, or cross-dressing so as to study at university. But there is just as strong a strand of support, sometimes from surprising quarters (Luther said it was vital for "even the weakest women" to read the Bible), and resistance, as in the vigorous 17th-century pamphlet wars and debates between women reader-writers and their critics.

Jack gives lots of space to exceptional women: learned, powerful, influential educationalists, writers or patrons. This of course gets easier to do as time goes on, as it's hard to presume the presence of women readers or makers of images from a single female footprint in a prehistoric cave. But there are some remarkable early examples of women readers – female Babylonian scribes; Athenian prostitutes leaving their graffiti on a cemetery wall; a Roman saint, Melania, "who would go through the Lives of the Fathers as if she were eating dessert". For the later, more well-known figures, there's now plenty of scholarly literature to draw on, and Jack makes good use of it in her treatment of famous readers such as Aphra Benn, Margery Kempe, Margaret Roper, and so on. I like Christine de Pisan's outburst in her 1405 The Book of the City of Women (why have so many men said and written such "awful damning things about women and their ways"? She is "at a loss as to how to explain it"), or the learned Eleanor of Aquitaine, forever reading on her tomb at Fontevraud Abbey, or poor Jane Carlyle, a brilliant, difficult woman stuck in a frustrating marriage to a bullying genius, describing her novel-reading as "like having an illicit affair".

What is always more difficult in book-history is to establish the habits of obscure readers, levels of literacy at particular times and place, everyday reading habits outside the elite class. Jack has put together some fascinating examples of this kind of hard-to-access material – networks of ordinary women readers, the development of a self-conscious analysis of the effects of reading on the character, changes in reading fashions, evidence of book-ownership. These range from 15th-century Italian women taking over their husbands' publishing businesses or 17th-century midwives as a particularly literate group, to thousands of 1850s French chambermaids buying Manon Lescaut, and a women's reading-circle in the Vaucluse, in the 1840s, cutting out instalments of novels from the newspapers and swapping them on Saturday evenings while the men went out to cafés.

Jack doesn't make the mistake of presenting an ever-upwards trajectory from the dark old unenlightened past to the liberated present. She ends her book with an account borrowed from Christina Lamb, of Afghan women under the Taliban setting up "sewing circles" in Herat, as a cover for talking about books. Under their bags of sewing materials they smuggled in books and pens. Inside the "Golden Needle Sewing School", they discussed their (western) reading, Shakespeare and Joyce and Dostoevsky – and their own writing – while children kept lookout in the playground. There are still times when reading requires courage; there will always be times when it changes people's lives.