To Be a “Book Girl”
Once, in a blaze of book love, I sent a copy of Anne of Green Gables to an eleven-year-old girl I had never met. This happened because of a conversation I had when I was twenty-three, sitting knee-to-knee with an extroverted flight attendant on a plane so small it was termed a “puddle jumper.” The jumpy engines and rattling sides of our rickety old aircraft made conversation and peace of mind seem impossible. But not for my seatmate, who cheerily shout-chatted away about life and the flight and her young daughter, and who suddenly stared me down with a good dose of curiosity. “What takes you to such an out-of-the-way little place as Prince Edward Island?”
“Why,” I said, gripping my seat a little tighter, and introvertedly shouting back, “Anne of Green Gables, of course. I love the books, and I’ve always dreamed of visiting.”
“Anne of Green who?”
I fumbled. I stuttered. I was aghast. My bookish brain felt as shaken as my bones as I tried to explain why everyone should read the Anne books. Especially eleven-year-old girls. I was almost embarrassed at my own enthusiasm over this one old tale of a sprite of a girl coming of age in a remote Canadian village. But I rose to the fray, attempting to shout a description of Anne’s wonders to my new friend. As I did, scene after scene came into my mind—images of Anne’s spunk and imagination, her determined curiosity, her tender heart. I thought of the woman’s young daughter, hating that any girl should grow up without Anne as an imagined companion, and in a tumbled, startling moment, I looked the flight attendant in her bright eyes and said, “Give me your address, and I’ll send your daughter a copy.”
She did. And so did I.
In that half-startled act, I came to a full understanding of something I already knew in the depths of my heart after years of reading, a fact fundamental to what it means to be a wise woman reader. A book girl is storyformed, shaped in her very concept of self by the characters she has encountered on the written page, by the narratives that teach her what it means to be a woman. A book girl is one who has looked through imagined eyes vastly different from her own so that her view of the world is broad and bright with countless varied perspectives. But a savvy book girl also knows that she who walks with the wise becomes wise (Proverbs 13:20), and the viewpoints she inhabits in imagination will shape the woman she becomes.
I am, I must confess, of the immovable opinion that every young girl (and woman) should read the Anne books, not just for their beauty and charm, but because they offer a particularly hearty and healthful view of womanhood. I was confirmed in this conviction by a conversation with two other women a couple of years back, strangers until the moment we discovered that all of us had read the Anne books in our formative girlhood years. We met at a conference: all three writers, all feeling a bit shy, but the mention of Anne pulled us out of our awkwardness and into a swift conversation that profoundly shaped my ideas about the power and development of self that comes to women who read, and read well.
For what we discovered was that each of us felt that the Anne books had helped to alert us to our vocation and creative capacity, challenging us to growth, grit, and wisdom. We listed the ways Anne had convinced us that we, too, were capable, creative, made for friendship, able to dream, created to learn. The Anne books, we realized, set a surprisingly powerful and attractive picture of womanhood before us in the years when we were beginning to wrestle with those fundamental questions of budding maturity: Who am I? Who should I be? What does it mean to live, love, work? What does it mean to be a woman?
And this was the reason I sent Anne of Green Gables to a little girl I’d never met. I knew that in a confusing, turbulent world where she will receive countless contradictory and often negative messages about what she, as a budding young woman, ought to be, Anne would come alongside her with health, possibility, innocence, and joy.
This is the ongoing and wondrous gift of all good literature. I have long argued that children cannot think in abstract terms, but I’m increasingly convinced that adults cannot either. What does it mean to be good, brave, and resourceful? We struggle to define those vague, existential ideas, but we know exactly what they look like when we see them embodied in Lucy from the Narnia books or Dorothea in Middlemarch, or described in the sparkle and wit that is the spiritual writing of G. K. Chesterton. A great book meets you in the narrative motion of your own life, showing you in vividly imagined ways exactly what it looks like to be evil or good, brave or cowardly, each of those choices shaping the happy (or tragic) ending of the stories in which they’re made. Books teach us to take hold of ourselves—to be, in philosophical terms, agents, with the capacity to learn, dream, think, and shape the world around us.
This is an excerpt from the upcoming release Book Girl: A Journey through the Treasures and Transforming Power of a Reading Life, available from retailers September 4, 2018.
is an author, a blogger, and a student of theology. She graduated from Wycliffe Hall, in Oxford, with a bachelor’s degree in theology and is currently studying for a Master’s in modern doctrine. She’s the author of several books on reading including Read for the Heart, Caught Up in a Story, and the upcoming Book Girl (a woman’s guide to the reading life). Through blogs, books, and her current research, she explores the theological significance of story, the intersection of theology and imagination, and the formative power of beauty. She can often be found with a cup of good coffee in one of the many quaint corners amid Oxford’s “dreaming spires,” where she lives in a red-doored cottage with her husband, Thomas, and their daughter, Lilian. You can follow Sarah’s literary adventures on her blog at sarahclarkson.com and over on Instagram.
Photograph © Thought Catalog, used with permission
