Unsuitable reading

" 'Reading, were you?'   Rupert picked up the book which lay on the little table by the fire.  It turned out to be the poems of Tennyson, bound in green morocco.  Could she really have been reading that? he wondered,  looking for the novel stuffed behind a cushion.

'Yes, but I was just going to make some coffee.  Would you like some?' said Ianthe.

How convenient women were, Rupert thought, accepting her offer, the way they were always 'just going' to make coffee or tea or perhaps had just  roasted a joint in the oven or made a cheese soufflé.

'I didn't think people read Tennyson nowadays,' he said, 'but then of course you aren't just "people". '

Ianthe flushed and busied herself with the coffee tray. She had not exactly been reading Tennyson but had remembered John quoting one of his poems during the first days of their acquaintance.
     
      Now lies my heart all Danae to the stars
      And all my heart lies open unto thee ...

She was ashamed to think that Rupert might have discovered her looking it up."

An Unsuitable Attachment   Barbara Pym

School books

"As for the few textbooks  that the class possessed, you could hardly look at them without feeling as though you had stepped back into the mid-nineteenth century.  There were only three textbooks of which each child had a copy.  One was a shilling arithmetic,  pre-War but fairly serviceable, and another was a horrid little book called The Hundred Page History of Britain --a nasty little duodecimo book with a gritty brown cover, and, for frontispiece, a portrait of Boadicea with a Union Jack draped over the front of her chariot.....

The date of the book was 1888.   Dorothy, who had never seen a history book of this description before, examined it with a feeling approaching horror.  There was also an extraordinary little 'reader' dated 1863.  It consisted mostly of bits out of Fenimore Cooper, Dr. Watts and Lord Tennyson, and at the end there were the queerest little 'Nature Notes' with woodcut illustrations.  There would be a woodcut of an elephant and underneath in small print: 'The Elephant is a sagacious beast.  He rejoices in the shade of the Palm Trees, and though stronger than six horses he will allow a little child to lead him.  His food is Bananas.'  And so on to the Whale, the Zebra, the Porcupine and the Spotted Camelopard."

A Clergyman's Daughter  George Orwell