When Queen Elizabeth II stumbles across a mobile library parked outside Buckingham Palace, a polite errand turns into an all-consuming passion for reading. Guided by a young kitchen boy who becomes her literary confidant, she works her way through novels, biographies, and poetry, and her inner life begins to expand in ways the royal household finds increasingly inconvenient. Alan Bennett's slyly funny novella imagines what happens when the most dutiful public figure in Britain discovers the private, subversive pleasure of books.
Books mentioned in The Uncommon Reader (15)
The Trees by Philip Larkin: “she rested on the ceremonial spade and recited by heart Philip Larkin's poem 'The Trees', with its final verse: Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May.”
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford: “So it was lucky that this time her eye happened to fall on a reissued volume of Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love.”
Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands by Queen Victoria: “my great-grandmother Queen Victoria, she wrote a book also, Leaves from a Highland Journal, and a pretty tedious book it is, too, and so utterly without offence as to be almost unreadable.”
My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley: “Meanwhile she got on with Norman's choice, My Dog Tulip by J.”
My Father and Myself by J.R. Ackerley: “Seeing that Ackerley had written an autobiography, she sent Norman down to the London Library to borrow it.”
Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford: “Having finished the Nancy Mitford sequel, Love in a Cold Climate, the Queen was delighted to see she had written others, and though some of them seemed to be history she put them on her (newly started) reading list, which she kept in her desk.”
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: “she began her Christmas broadcast with the opening paragraph of A Tale of Two Cities ('It was the best of times.'”
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: “Sitting there with his hands pressed together like something out of Alice in Wonderland, he gave no hint of what he was thinking. Low confidence: this is a passing simile/comparison rather than a scene of the Queen actually reading the book, but the title named is specific and unambiguous, so kept per the project's generosity rule for…”
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: “She flew to Scotland happy in the (occasionally exasperating) company of Tristram Shandy, and when she got bored with him Trollope (Anthony) was never far away.”
The Convergence of the Twain by Thomas Hardy: “It's called "The Convergence of the Twain". (Same broadcast episode as: 'though she did not read the Hardy poem (rejected as not "forward-looking")' -- the two candidate excerpts describe the same scene, giving both the title and the poet.)”
Kama Sutra by Vātsyāyana: “The Kama Sutra?' Sir Kevin sighed. Low confidence: this is a sarcastic rhetorical aside (the Queen mocking a suggestion of 'ethnic classics'), not an account of her reading it, and traditional authorship of this ancient text is itself disputed -- kept because a specific, real, singular work is named outright.”
Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant by Emily Dickinson: “Forster who said: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant, success in circuit lies." Or was it', she asked the room, 'Emily Dickinson?' Unsurprisingly, the room did not answer.”
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust: “The Queen's ignorance of Proust was, unlike the foreign secretary's, soon to be remedied, as Norman straightaway looked him up on the internet and, finding that the novel ran to thirteen volu[mes]”
Marcel Proust: A Biography by George D. Painter: “George Painter's biography of Proust went with them, too.”
Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling: “There were many who hoped for a similar meeting of minds by saying they were reading Harry Potter, but to this the Queen (who had no time for fantasy) invariably said briskly, 'Yes.”