A Punch cartoon of 1885, with the caption ‘Valuable Collection in the Reading-Room, British Museum’, showcases the power and problems affiliated with exteriority for women at the British Museum Reading Room. The cartoon series heading, ‘Interiors and Exteriors’, offers a touchstone for precisely the kind of exteriority I attribute to this space, one where intellectual, spiritual and creative acts and experiences – what we might call ‘interior’ states – usefully converge with the ‘exterior’ features of a public room of readers and writers encircled by the lettered past contained in the bookshelves. The only notable female figure in this sketch, A. Mary F. Robinson seems like a Pre-Raphaelite-styled stunner perched on a desk, her hands resting on her 1878 collection of poetry, A Handful of Honeysuckle, a publication which drew lots of acclaim. Although Robinson is but a spectacle in a crowd of many male readers, some of the readers lampooned here had ties to women who took advantage of the exteriority the space offered. Algernon Charles Swinburne appears with a book of poems in the lower left corner; two years earlier in 1883, he published A Century of Roundels dedicated to Christina Rossetti. Three figures up the row from Swinburne, and towards the catalogue tables at the centre, is Leslie Stephen whose daughter Virginia Woolf would condemn this space as an enclave of male privilege; and in the lower right corner is Frederick Furnivall, looking scrappy and seedy as he peruses a pamphlet from one of his literary societies for which Eleanor Marx provided copy.