‘Books without which I cannot write’: How Did Eighteenth-century Women Writers Get the Books They Read?

Abstract

I offer this essay as homage to libraries and to borrowing books. I also mean it as a riposte to the emphasis on shopping and consumerism in social history and cultural studies beginning in the 1980s. Shopping surely has importance, but I do not believe we are what we buy. Certainly for the eighteenth century, it would be truer to say, ‘We are what we borrow’. I am sure that one origin of my own scholarly career lies in the strange and wild euphoria I felt as a New York City child allowed to browse in the adult stacks of the Queensborough New York City Public Library - a library not quite as large and imposing as the Manhattan Library, but large and imposing enough, and possessed of its own pair of stone lions on the steps. As a grown-up scholar, I felt a kindred joy and gratitude to the people of Ireland when I was able to walk into the National Library of Ireland and call for any eighteenth-century Irish newspaper or rare book I wanted, without having paid any fee or shown any identification, not even a passport.