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Textual Preferences: the Queer Afterlives of Childhood Reading DOCTORAL THESIS Textual preferences the queer afterlives of childhood reading Pyke, Sarah Award date: 2020 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 10. Oct. 2021 Textual Preferences: The Queer Afterlives of Childhood Reading by Sarah Pyke BA (Hons), MA A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD Department of English and Creative Writing University of Roehampton 2020 Abstract Textual Preferences: The Queer Afterlives of Childhood Reading asks how childhood and adolescent reading, and experiences-with-books more broadly, contribute to queer self-fashioning. Drawing on original oral histories gathered from ten UK-based, self- identified LGBTQ adults born between 1949 and 1981, it maps from memories of books and reading these narrators’ various material and textual investments, affiliations, identifications and practices. In so doing, it establishes a corpus of fourteen texts of particular significance to these narrators, proposing an alternative history of book-use and reading with specific resonance for LGBTQ individuals. Over four chapters, Textual Preferences examines the book as material object and the haptic and bodily aspects of reading; the spaces and places of reading and book culture; the various reading strategies of these ten narrators; and the intersection between books, reading and the strange temporalities of queer experience. Informed by current work in book history, the history of reading and queer studies, it positions oral history as a productive methodology for research in these fields; it additionally intervenes in oral history praxis, arguing that attention to the paraverbal and nonverbal aspects of the interview can reveal much about the relations between the book and the (queer) reading subject. Constituting a rich body of material otherwise at risk of remaining unarticulated and unrecorded, the reading histories and memories on which this study draws form a unique aural and textual archive for future scholarly use, which will be preserved by the University of Roehampton. 2 Contents Acknowledgements 4 List of Figures 5 Introduction A list of books loved in childhood 7 Chapter One “Foxed and careworn”: The queer object of the book 61 Chapter Two “A space where I could be me”: The queer space of reading 105 Chapter Three “Reading for something queer to be in there”: The process and practice of queer reading 151 Chapter Four “The childhood I was meant to be in”: The queer time of reading 200 Conclusion “Burning in my rucksack all the way home” 242 Appendix 1: Flyer for recruitment 256 Appendix 2: Sample participant consent form and Oral History Recording Agreement 258 Appendix 3: The Textual Preferences archive 264 Works Cited 268 3 Acknowledgements My primary thanks to my unfailingly generous, patient and encouraging supervisory team, Dr Alison Waller, my Director of Studies, and Dr Shelley Trower; and to my former Director of Studies Dr Lisa Sainsbury. The English and Creative Writing Department at the University of Roehampton, led by Professor Laura Peters, and the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature have provided a nurturing home for this project from its inception. Alison Chand ably supported in timecoding and compiling cover sheets for my transcripts, and Kornelia Cepok at the University of Roehampton catalogued the Textual Preferences archive: I am indebted to you both. Grateful thanks also to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, who funded this research as part of Memories of Fiction: An Oral History of Readers’ Life Stories (2014- 18). Latterly, Arts SU and LSESU provided a flexible and welcoming working environment throughout 2018-19 which enabled me to pay my way when the funds ran out. Thanks beyond words to my parents, Judy and Adrian, who were there for me in every way when life took an unexpected turn in the middle of my doctoral studies, and to my brothers and wider family, who were right behind them. My endlessly supportive and accepting friends, inside and outside academia, have kept me going. To my PhD friends and colleagues in particular, Anne, Erica, Sinéad, Emily, Nick, Kay: your unflagging enthusiasm for my work, belief in me, and the excellent example of your own scholarship have been a constant resource over these years, and one for which I am profoundly thankful. My thanks to Ginny, who listened and is still listening. To Gill, who is present in these pages in more ways than one. And lastly, to my ten narrators, without whom this thesis simply would not exist: Alice, Andy, Amy, Carol, Eileen, Jo, Julia, Kate, Mark and Mary. It was a privilege to talk with you about books and reading, and to listen to your stories; thank you for letting me tell some of them here. 4 List of Figures Fig. 1. Doctor Smith and Doctor Jakes, illustrated by Ruth Gervis, in Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (1936. Puffin, 1983), p. 183. Fig. 2. Kathleen Raine, pictured with Mijbil the otter. Photograph reproduced in Gavin Maxwell, The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy, edited by Austin Chinn (Penguin, 2001), Section 1, p. 4. Fig. 3. Gavin Maxwell’s hearth at Camusfeàrna. Photograph reproduced in Gavin Maxwell, The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy, edited by Austin Chinn (Penguin, 2001), Section 1, p. 2. Fig 4. Jimmy Watt at a waterfall. Photograph reproduced in Gavin Maxwell, The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy, edited by Austin Chinn (Penguin, 2001), Section 1, p. 3. Fig. 5. Jimmy Watt, pictured with Edal the otter. Photograph reproduced in Gavin Maxwell, The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy, edited by Austin Chinn (Penguin, 2001), Section 1, p. 8. Fig. 6. Gavin Maxwell in the doorway at Camusfeàrna. Photograph reproduced in Gavin Maxwell, The Ring of Bright Water Trilogy, edited by Austin Chinn (Penguin, 2001), Section 1, p. 2. Fig. 7. Illustration of Jill, Ann, and Diana, by Caney, in Ruby Ferguson’s Jill Enjoys Her Ponies (Hodder and Stoughton, 1954), p. 11. Fig. 8. “I cannot think of a work of literature that has influenced me more powerfully than this”: the Reverend Richard Coles tweets his appreciation of the Ladybird edition of The Princess and the Pea, written by Vera Southgate and illustrated by Eric Winter (@revrichardcoles); Twitter, 28 Nov. 2015, 3:31 p.m., twitter.com/RevRichardColes/status/670503501173272580. Fig. 9. Clay Larkin’s A Different Love: A Gay Romance (Alyson Publications, 1983) – an example of a book with the kind of “tacky cover” that Jim was “embarrassed to want to read” (@gaystheword); Twitter, 25 July 2018, 11:24 p.m., twitter.com/gaystheword/status/1022246308793475072. Fig. 10. Paul Monette’s 1992 Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, in the 1994 Abacus edition, as borrowed by sixteen-year-old Uli from his public library. Uli recalls being “drawn to the image of a beautiful, self-possessed man with an originality of bearing on the cover” (@gaystheword); Twitter, 25 July 2018, 9:55 p.m., twitter.com/gaystheword/status/1022223934937288704. 5 Fig. 1. Doctor Smith and Doctor Jakes, illustrated by Ruth Gervis, in Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (1936. Puffin, 1983), p. 183. 6 Introduction A list of books loved in childhood “[A] list of the books that someone most loved when he or she was a child might be as revealing of his or her psychology as a Rorschach test”, suggests the poet Stephen Spender in Antonia Fraser’s 1992 anthology, The Pleasure of Reading (4). For Spender, what is ‘revealed’ is something of his adult sexual orientation and gender identity. “The fact that I preferred Ballantyne’s The Coral Island to the military tales of G. A. Henty, though I never quite sank to the depths of Barrie’s Peter Pan,” confesses Spender, “is a sure sign that in later life I would prove to be a Cissy” (4). The author Lee Lynch opens her 1990 essay “Cruising the Libraries”, an account of her evolution as a reader and writer of lesbian literature, with a reading list of her own. “Little Ms. Muffet? Phooey. Cinderella? You have to be kidding”, she writes. “Maybe Prince Charming, but he was pretty innocuous, as well as male [...] Nancy Drew? Now she had promise. Dr. Doolittle [sic]? Absolutely” (39). Lynch recalls reading in childhood as a kind of quest, a search to find someone – anyone – “in literature like little Lee” (39). But how are these memories of reading to be understood? In what sense is RM Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858) more “Cissy” than “the military tales of G.A. Henty” – but somehow less so than JM Barrie’s Peter and Wendy (1911)? How to explain the frisson that attaches here to Nancy Drew’s suggested “promise”? Or the reasons Doctor Dolittle – as Lynch admits, “a bumbling, middle-aged man” – might be more “like” a small tomboyish girl than either Little Miss Muffet or Cinderella (39)? Borne of a fascination with these moments of transaction between childhood reading and LGBTQ selfhood, this thesis argues that books and reading are intimately bound up with queer experience, with what it means to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or a person of otherwise non-normative sexual orientation and/or gender identity, from the earliest textual encounters onwards.
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