Women Who Read Are Dangerous

Have just purchased a wonderful book from our amazing local independent bookshop, Browsers Bookshop (www.browsers-bookshop.co.uk).  The title: Women Who Read Are Dangerous by Stefan Bollmann, jumped out at me from the bookshelf, made me smile and of course I couldn't leave it there.  The Foreword is by Karen Joy Fowler and is as enjoyable as the book itself.

Gorgeously reproduced pictures are interspersed throughout the book which range in tone from "pious to scandalous, charming to mysterious" (Nancy G. Heller, PhD, author of Women Artists:  An Illustrated History).

All the pictures, even the nudes, are of women reading.  Each, it would seem, immersed in her own secret life.  And this was what, historically, according to the book, raised alarm - that through reading a woman could indulge in a secret life!  "Should they be permitted, even within the confines of their own imaginations, to be unchaste?" asks Karen Joy Fowler in her Foreword.

So what, I wonder, does that make us, romance writers?  A band of subversives, not content with just reading of, but hell bent on creating the secret lives of our women characters, sharing their trials, naughty pleasures and vices with other women readers?

If so, all I can say is Write On!