Reading Women - Hardcover

Bollmann, Stefan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1858943329 ISBN 13: 9781858943329

Publisher: Merrell Pub Ltd, 2007

Synopsis

This book brings together a selection of beautiful paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs of women reading by a diverse range of artists from the Middle Ages to the present day. Works by Vermeer, Manet, and Whistler are featured alongside those of Edward Hopper and photographer Eve Arnold, among many others. Each image is accompanied by a commentary explaining the context in which it was created - who the reader is, her relationship with the artist, and what she is reading.

About this title

About the Author:

Stefan Bollman is writer and editor, and the author of several books. Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six books, including 'Sarah Canary, Sister Noon' and the bestselling 'The Jane Austen Book Club'.

From Booklist:

Women in crisp white frocks, extravagant gowns, and nary a stitch read books in gardens, at tables, and in bed, each utterly enthralled and transported. Beginning in the Middle Ages and sweeping forward to include paintings by Vermeer, Fragonard, Vuillard, and Hopper, Bollman has gathered arresting portraits of women entranced by books in all sorts of circumstances. Best-selling novelist Karen Joy Fowler provides a stirring foreword, in which she muses over how hard women had to fight for the right to literacy and the freedom to read. A woman reading, after all, is a woman not cooking or cleaning. Bollman further explicates the obstacles reading women faced when reading was considered more of a vice than a virtue for females. Providing shrewd and entertaining commentary for each heart-lifting image of women in book-induced reveries, Bollman covers a delectably wide spectrum of book-struck women, beginning with Simone Martini's 1333 Annunciation, in which Mary is clearly displeased at having her reading interrupted, and ending with an Eve Arnold photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading Joyce's Ulysses. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Merrell Pub Ltd
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1858943329
• ISBN 13: 9781858943329
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 149