If I had not first registered for a Reader Pass at the British Library in January 1998, perhaps I would not have written this book. Seeing displaced readers adjusting to the new reading rooms – and only a few were open in the early months of the library on Euston Road – and overhearing lamentations over the closing of the Round Reading Room half a mile south piqued my curiosity. Perhaps the end of the era of the British Museum Reading Room inspired A. S. Byatt's Possession. Although the novel was written and published nearly a decade before the closing of Bloomsbury's big bookroom, the writing was on those round walls already for over a decade and surely Byatt knew that the days of the national library at the British Museum were closely numbered.

Byatt introduces this venue with the familiar tropes about the stuffy atmosphere, ‘the insufficient oxygen for all the diligent readers’, and the domed room as almost a chemical experiment like ‘Humphrey Davy's bell-jar’, the Reading Room pattern of circles in a Dantesque formation (Byatt 1990: 31). What draws me still is the presence of women readers both within and at the margins of Byatt's novel. Victorian poet Christabel LaMotte, the object of the research quest by the late twentieth-century readers within and beyond the British Museum and the London Library, is no less intriguing than ‘For Isobel Armstrong’, the scholar to whom Byatt dedicates the novel.