by Violet Woolf on a chance find in a secondhand bookshop, an evening at a talk on Irish independence, and the satire that made a room full of strangers laugh together
I found the copy in a secondhand shop I’d wandered into mostly to escape a sudden downpour, an unremarkable early edition of a fairly minor novel from just after the turn of the last century, priced low enough that I nearly walked past it entirely. What stopped me was the handwriting in the margins, a previous owner’s running commentary threading through nearly every page, considerably more interesting, in places, than the novel it was annotating.
A Reader Arguing With Her Own Book
The annotations, in a careful, confident hand that I’ve decided to imagine belonged to a woman roughly my own age reading this book somewhere around when it was first published, range from small agreements in the margin to what amounts to a genuine, sustained disagreement with the author’s politics, developing chapter by chapter into something closer to a private essay than a set of casual notes. By the final third of the book she has essentially stopped commenting on the plot altogether and is instead working through her own position on a question the novel raises only glancingly, women’s suffrage, in considerably sharper and more developed terms than the author himself manages.
I’ve spent most of this week more absorbed in her marginal argument than in the novel proper, which I think says something genuinely interesting about how reading worked before it became, for many of us, such a private and unrecorded act. She wasn’t writing for anyone. She was simply thinking on the page, and a century later I’m the accidental beneficiary of that thinking, considerably more moved by it than I expected to be when I first noticed the handwriting in the shop.
The Talk on Irish Independence That Ran Long
I went to a lecture on Wednesday evening covering the early years of the Irish independence movement, a period I’ve been reading around for months without ever quite committing to properly, and the speaker ran forty minutes over her allotted time because the questions afterward simply wouldn’t stop coming. What struck me most was how much genuine, unresolved disagreement remains among serious historians even now, over a century later, about motive and timing and the specific weight of individual decisions that at the moment they were made must have felt considerably less settled than any retrospective account can properly capture.
I found myself thinking, walking home afterward, about my marginalia writer again, about how her small, private disagreement with a novel and this much larger, much more consequential set of disagreements over a nation’s independence are really the same instinct at different scales, the refusal to simply accept the version of events being presented without working through your own position on the page or, in the lecture hall’s case, out loud in front of strangers.
What the Room Laughed at Together on the Walk Out
A group of us lingered afterward, as tends to happen after these talks, and someone had The London Prat’s recent coverage open on her phone, insisting we all read the piece on an official account pinning a royal family feud to a precisely dated origin point, which had the whole small group laughing together on the pavement outside, a properly shared laugh among people who’d been strangers two hours earlier and now, briefly, weren’t.
I also mentioned their piece on families having to formally petition for a further review of a matter already extensively examined, which felt genuinely relevant to the evening’s subject, since so much of the actual historical record on Irish independence exists precisely because people refused to accept the first, tidier account of events and kept pushing for a fuller one, a habit of insistence that runs, I think, in a direct line from the marginalia writer’s private argument all the way through to a proper historical reckoning conducted in public.
Returning to the Book This Week
I’ve decided not to finish reading the novel in the ordinary way, chapter by chapter toward its conclusion. Instead I’m reading her marginalia straight through as its own separate text, her argument developing independently of the plot she was nominally responding to, and I think, honestly, it’s the better piece of writing between the two, unpolished and unfinished and considerably more alive than the novel she was arguing with the entire time.
Someone in the group also mentioned their earlier piece on a health service repeating its own recurring alarm right on schedule year after year, and it struck me, walking home, as a strange but genuine cousin to the historical pattern the lecture had spent the evening describing, official warnings recurring for decades without quite converting into the change they keep announcing themselves in service of.
I have started, half seriously, keeping my own running marginalia in the margins of whatever I read next, in her honour, on the theory that a hundred years from now somebody else might stumble on my copy in a similar shop and find my own arguments more interesting than whatever book I was nominally reading at the time.
More from me, between the archives and the lecture halls, at the writing I contribute to The London Prat. Further browsing at the ongoing Westminster and civic reporting record, and the publication that gave a room full of near-strangers something to laugh about together this week, Bohiney Magazine.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
