Women Who Read Are Dangerous is a book which I bought at Stockbridge in Edinburgh a couple of months ago. Obviously in times past it was quite unusual for females to be educated, but to be fair a lot of men couldn’t read either. I’ve no doubt that there were plenty of the so called upper classes who thought it was a mistake to educate the masses. In this book there’s a selection of paintings, drawings and photographs of women reading. The artworks range from the Middle Ages, when teaching women to read was frowned upon by many men, to the present day. You would probably recognise quite a few of the paintings as some of the images appear on the sidebar of some blogs.

I was hoping that it was one of those books on Amazon which you can keek into to get a flavour of but unfortunatly it isn’t. I ‘m somewhat shocked at how expensive this book is online as I bought it for £2. The one below is of Katie Lewis by Sir Edward Burne-Jones

Above is The Artist’s Sisters by Carl Christian Constantin Hansen

Above is The Rose Garden by Peder Severin Kroyer

I love Jessie Marion King’s work and the illustration above was created for the book called The Magic Grammar. King was a Scottish artist.

There are loads of lovely images in this book and as Marilyn Munro was apparently a very keen reader I thought I’d include the one below in this post. The version of the photo in the book is in colour.

Apparently the book she is reading is Ulysses. According to the photographer Eve Arnold Marilyn was reading the book before she turned up for the photo shoot. She said it was hard work and she was reading it out loud to understand it better.