ALBERT EINSTEIN is reputed to have said: “Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” Carol Atherton’s wonderful and exceptionally readable book doesn’t dispute that claim, but makes a compelling case for returning to the literature that we study at school.
Reading Lessons is a book about books and how diminished we are when we treat the literature that crops up, year by year, on high-school curricula merely as “exam fodder”. This book is charged with love for reading and for literature’s horizon-expanding brilliance. Perhaps, most of all, Atherton — a secondary-school teacher with 30 years’ experience — presents an urgent case for teaching itself.
Her approach is simple: each chapter focuses on a “set text” from GCSE and A-level curricula, and — in a beguiling combination of anecdote, memoir, and skilful literary analysis — offers illuminating readings of old classics. I remember Robert Browning’s poem “My Last Duchess” as a stodgy exercise in dramatic irony which sent even the most engaged of us into slumbers; Atherton offers a reading that exposes not only its formal brilliance, but locates it in modern gender and sexual power dynamics.
In her all-boys school, she teaches “My Last Duchess” through the frame of “coercive control”. In an age in which so many young men are exposed to toxic-masculinity influencers online, Atherton’s approach is urgent.
Lest anyone worry, Reading Lessons is no pious manifesto, but deeply human. I wept while reading the chapter on Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, as Atherton recalled the emotional and psychological impacts of studying and teaching during the Section 28 era. Another moving theme of the book is class, and specifically its subtle gradations.
In her chapter on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, Atherton’s description of “the wall in the head” — that cringe that lower-class children feel when they move into middle- and upper-class spaces — chimed brilliantly with my experience as someone who has negotiated the unconscious class expectations of both academia and the Church.
Ultimately, this is a book full of faith in the power of education and of literature’s gift for offering a life of imagination. I cannot disagree with her conclusion: “Love alone . . . is not going to be enough to sustain English teaching.” Investment and care matter. None the less, Atherton’s book gives me hope in a world in which the arts are seemingly treated as a luxury for the few rather than the right of many.
The Ven. Dr Rachel Mann is the Archdeacon of Bolton and Salford, and a Visiting Fellow of Manchester Met University.
Reading Lessons: The books we read at school, the conversations they spark and why they matter
Carol Atherton
Fig Tree £18.99
(978-0-241-62948-2)
Church Times Bookshop £17.09
