Record Number: 3842

---

Reading Experience:

Evidence:

'Years of reading had made [Ruth Slate] tired of squabbling between competing religious sects, and it was Tolstoy's Resurrection that finally gave her the courage to plow her own furrow: "I must be different, or the best in me will die!"... With an evangelical zeal freed from the moorings of dogma, Ruth plunged into the post-Victorian 'sex question'. She heard lectures on eugenics and women's diseases and read Auguste Forel's Sexual Ethics, though she could hardly bear to glance through The Great Scourge, where Christabel Pankhurst insisted that the vast majority of men were infected with venereal disease. She was intrigued when a woman argued in the avant-garde New Age that the temple prostitutes of the East were a much better arrangement than the "unsanitary" way of ordering these things in the West. She gravitated to Francoise Lafitte and the Freewoman magazine, which agitated for the sexual emancipation of women'.

Century:

1900-1945

Date:

Between 1897 and 1917

Country:

England

Time

n/a

Place:

n/a

Type of Experience
(Reader):
 

silent aloud unknown
solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

Type of Experience
(Listener):
 

solitary in company unknown
single serial unknown

---

Reader / Listener / Reading Group:

Reader:

Ruth Slate

Age:

Adult (18-100+)

Gender:

Female

Date of Birth:

1884

Socio-Economic Group:

Labourer (non-agricultural)

Occupation:

packer, became clerk

Religion:

Methodist

Country of Origin:

England

Country of Experience:

England

Listeners present if any:
e.g family, servants, friends

n/a

Additional Comments:

n/a

---

Text Being Read:

Author:

Leo Tolstoy

Title:

Resurrection

Genre:

Fiction

Form of Text:

Print: Book

Publication Details

n/a

Provenance

unknown

---

Source Information:

Record ID:

3842

Source:

Print

Author:

Jonathan Rose

Editor:

n/a

Title:

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes

Place of Publication:

New Haven

Date of Publication:

2001

Vol:

n/a

Page:

216

Additional Comments:

n/a

Citation:

Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, (New Haven, 2001), p. 216, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=3842, accessed: 22 December 2024

---

Additional Comments:

See Tierl Thompson, 'Dear Girl: The Diaries and Letters of Two Working Women 1897-1917' (London, 1987)