Gender identities, claims Isabelle Matamoros, were significantly reconfigured in the decades after 1815. It would probably be hard to identify a time when this was not the case, but Matamoros focusses on the period from the 1820s to the 1840s to synthesize and review the evidence on women’s reading from a gender perspective. Her study is based on ego-documents written by 66 women all born between 1789 and 1832. She analyses correspondence, journaux intimes and other autobiographical writings, some of it written long after her chosen period, as women reflected later in life on their youth and childhood. Some of her source documents remain unpublished, but she has hunted for them not only in the obvious places, but also in the Paris municipal archives, various departmental archives and the holdings of the Association pour l’Autobiographie. She has assembled a considerable archive on women’s reading practices in the early nineteenth century.

Matamoros claims that her authors constitute ‘une génération élargie’ (16), all singing at her command in a ‘polyphonic choir’ (36). Consensus among so many different readers, however, is elusive; her list of the works and authors they all mentioned includes dozens of entries with only one or two mentions each – in other words, their reading choices were extremely diverse. There are some very well-known names in her ‘choir’: George Sand, Flora Tristan, Suzanne Voilquin and the Saint-Simonians, Louise Michel among them. Aristocrats and women of the haute bourgeoisie are over-represented, and the presence alone of these celebrities suggests we are about to meet a group of independent women prepared to challenge the conventions of bourgeois marriage, and defy gender expectations in general.

Matamoros produces a collective biography of their reading choices, subjected to gender analysis. She asks how far they accepted or rejected the exclusion of women from certain fields of knowledge, how far they either internalised or rebelled against gender norms. Their reading culture, therefore, is analysed not solely through the lens of female subordination, but it is also combed for signs of criticism and resistance.

In order to explore the gap between the normative discourse on women’s reading and their actual reading practices, Matamoros must first outline the dominant discourse on reading, at a time when women’s reading was widely perceived as increasing and becoming a social problem. Here Matamoros probably exaggerates the gender gap in literacy competence: the signature test always disguised and underestimated female reading ability; moreover, her cohort is top-heavy with aristocrats and women of the upper bourgeoisie – the social groups least affected by a rise in female literacy. A long section sets out the medical, pedagogical and religious instructions and taboos surrounding reading. The feminist discourse on reading, discussed later in the book, is not subjected to such a rigorous critique.

The author shows how, after the age of seven, the education of young girls moulded their gender identities, steering them away from the study of rhetoric and the classical humanities which were coded masculine. Young women’s upbringing was designed to make them useful as mothers and housekeepers without encouraging them to take up higher studies or to become savantes. The influence of Rebecca Rogers ensures that the discussion of educational ideas rests on a sound basis, although I felt that this section was written with less energy than the rest. Matamoros says little that is new in this section, but she brings the discussion to life by introducing some well-publicised criminal cases to illustrate contemporary prejudices, and by focussing on the example of Herminie de la Bassemoûterie, who was modest, pious, entered a convent and was dutifully horrified by novels.

Daughters, as we know, were disadvantaged compared to their brothers, who had access to science and mathematics, Latin and plenty of opportunity for outdoor exercise. For young daughters, these were all taboo areas, and they were encouraged instead to learn their catechism, read histoire sainte, and perfect the arts of music, dance and drawing. The misogynist discourse on women’s reading established a hierarchy of literary genres. At the bottom end came the epistolary, intimate and sentimental noveI, which was considered a feminine genre associated with the empathetic or immersive style of reading thought characteristic of women’s reading. Men, in contrast, were encouraged to read with more distance from the text, exercising their ‘natural’ faculties of logical and dispassionate reasoning. In most cases, sisters accepted their assumed intellectual inferiority compared to their brothers. But there were also opportunities for furtive reading, if they and their brothers attended classes given by the same tutor, or if sisters borrowed or secreted the books their brothers brought home. Women might cut articles out of discarded newspapers to send them to friends or copy them into their correspondence. Brother/sister exchanges are interestingly illuminated by a discussion of Henriette and Ernest Renan.

At the core of the book lies Matamoros’ construction of her cohort’s bibliothèque virtuelle, consisting of about 300 titles written by 160 authors – all the books mentioned in their writings. Here the heterogeneity of the “polyphonic choir” is starkly apparent. The group ranges from devout Catholics and legitimists to non-conformists and socialists. Added to this problem is the partial nature of the source material. Autobiographical sources are very valuable for the history of reading, because they take us one step beyond the production statistics and evidence of book sales, to allow us to see the book in the hands of actual readers. However, autobiographies never tell us everything an individual read. Instead, they emphasise the titles which authors believed played a role in shaping their representations of themselves. They remember a book that helped to make them what they are, or they recall one that sums up everything they would later reject in the pursuit of a new identity.

The findings do not hold any startling revelations. It is unsurprising to learn that Walter Scott was the most-read novelist by this group, or that livres de piété like the Imitation de Jésus-Christ, St Augustine and Bossuet had a significant presence in this imaginary library. It also contained plenty of romantic poetry (Lamartine, Byron, Schiller, Mickiewicz), and some female authors, at least in the early Restoration period, including Madame de Genlis, Madame de Staël, Sophie Gay, Ann Radcliffe and Sophie Cottin, although they had faded from sight by the 1840s. Women readers mentioned plenty of history, from Tacitus to Guizot, usually the history of Great Men but including histories of the French Revolution and various historical memoirs. Matamoros emphasises the influence of Romanticism, but this must be balanced by traditional religious literature, and the presence of classical writers like Molière, Corneille and Racine. There are some surprising absences from Matamoros’ list which are not explained. There is no mention of the feuilleton literature of the 1840s, and hardly a trace of Victor Cousin, although we know he had some keen female readers.

The penultimate section, and perhaps the most absorbing, revolves around individual case studies, for example of Sophie Ulliac-Trémadeure, who wrote moral and didactic works, but never sought to question the intellectual superiority of men. She wanted intellectual freedom, but without transgressing dominant gender norms – a transgression which would have marginalised her. Justine Guillery is cited as an example of a woman who willingly trespassed into male territory, reading philosophy, Latin and Greek. Both these women worked, they studied, and they never married so their lives contradicted dominant expectations of women. They even presented themselves as autodidacts – although they came from well-educated bourgeois families – but this claim reflected the independent trajectory of their intellectual progress and emancipation. It was a solitary effort, going against the grain of conventional gender roles. This is a successful essay on women’s reading that refused to obey the rules, but it is nuanced enough to comprehend women readers’ hesitancy to do so.

Matamoros has produced a work of gender history and the history of education, which is also a history of reading. The autobiographical writings studied attached great importance to reading as a child and as a jeune fille. The reading of this motley group was sometimes intensive in the case of devout Catholics, and sometimes extensive, as in the reading of fiction. Matamoros successfully presents reading as a territory where gender roles were defined but also where norms were subverted. The biases inherent in her selected cohort of readers ensures that there is plenty of material suggesting subversion.

In spite of its achievements, the study left me wanting more on two counts. Firstly, Matamoros concentrates on what her young women read, but neglects the study of how they read. The normative discourse insisted on slow digestion and sustained thinking preferably aided by taking notes. It would be interesting to consider how far Matamoros’ women readers followed such injunctions, which seem appropriate both for an intellectual studying philosophy as well as a devout Catholic concerned with her inner spiritual development. Secondly, the opportunity to consider the history of writing is not taken. The study of l’apprentissage à la lecture is not paralleled by a study of l’apprentissage à l’écriture or of the prevailing discourse on female writing. In spite of a few pages dedicated to the journal intime, the written sources are mined for data on reading, and not approached in their own right as evidence of the place of writing in the lives of young women. The history of writing remains to be studied, and it will require students like Matamoros to subject it to the rich insights of gender history.