Laudator Temporis Acti

Stella Bowen (1893-1947), Drawn from Life (1941; rpt. London: Virago, 1984), pp. 16-17:

My really besetting sin was reading, and this got worse. I would read in bed, against orders, extinguishing my candle when I heard my mother's footsteps in the passage, and relighting after she had passed. I would persuade myself that I could get to school in ten minutes and read till I had but seven left in which to cover a quarter of an hour's walk, and arrive late again, and breathless. My mother spoke to me very gravely about this self-indulgence.

There was no lack of reading-matter in our home. We had the complete works of Carlyle, very handsomely bound; all the Victorian poets and essayists; the History of the Reformation, the Decline and Fall, and criticisms and biographies of many writers whose own works we did not possess. There were also the complete novels of Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, which I was allowed to read, with the exception of Adam Bede and Jane Eyre. But my earliest reading consisted of Rosa Nouchette Carey, Charlotte Yonge, and Juliana Horatia Ewing. I swallowed them all with enthusiasm, and was easily convinced that nothing mattered in life but unselfishness and piety. At one time I announced that I would like to go as a missionary to Melanesia! . . .

On Sundays we were not allowed to read secular literature, but there was a long series called "Sunday Echoes in Week-day Hours," which illustrated the Collect, Gospel, or Epistle for the day in a fictional manner. I can remember that the gilding on this pill was definitely insufficient.