Editor's Column—The Fantasy of the Library

Abstract

A writer, I used to envy Virginia Woolf.I envied her not because she had the audacity and authority to declare that "on or about December 1910 human character changed" ("Character" 38), nor because she invented modernist style, but because she had the good fortune to live in Bloomsbury, close to the British Museum and its famous Reading Room (ig.1).In my imagination, Woolf's London homes-46 Gordon Square, 52 Tavistock Square, and 37 Mecklenburgh Square-were not just places in the social geography of London, or simple markers on the literary map of Bloomsbury; rather, they were outposts in a cartography of reading whose epicenter was the British Museum's room, which Woolf had described in A Room of One's Own as "the vast dome . . . the huge, bald forehead which is so splendidly encircled by a band of famous names" (33).I always imagined Woolf walking the short distance from one of her homes to the British Museum, passing through Sydney Smirke's iron gates, past the Roman and Greek igures, and arriving at the Reading Room with bated breath, ready to commune with the major authors in the En glish canon, which I, a child of late empire, would come to know as Beowulf to Woolf.Mastering Beowulf to Woolf was once a rite of passage, the gateway to Matthew Arnold's kingdom of culture-"the best which has been thought and said in the world" (5).Since I could never visit Woolf's "band of famous names," I dreamed about what the colonial library meant for those who belonged to it through an enforced language and culture but were out of it because of the stain of subjection.And because the Reading Room of the British Museum was so far removed from my ordinary

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