One fact about most kinds of reading and writing is that they require a kind of solitary repose--a room of one's own, as Virginia Woolf famously claims. In his lecture series The Preparation of the Novel, Roland Barthes declares that time spent with friends must count against the advance of any literary project. In an age of constant digital communication, this calculation seems quaint: surely the pleasures of being amongst interlocutors, even virtual ones, multiply the satisfactions of the lonely page. Stacey McDowell's Reading Sympathy in Romantic Literature, which is in conversation with Nancy Yousef's and Adela Pinch's work, is here to tell us that this dichotomy might always have been false. In her account, social literacy has played a significant role in producing and heralding what we think of as literature in the first place.

McDowell's examples are specific but wide-ranging. They include the thwarted lovers Eduard and Ottelie in Goethe's Elective Affinities conspiring as readers and writers of the same script, Wollstonecraft reading Godwin's essays while imagining him as her lover, and an unwell Keats annotating lines of Spenser so that Fanny Brawne might follow his cues in working her own way through the book. McDowell collects scenes of reading that are sites of intersubjectivity both imagined and actual, longed-for and realized.

McDowell's examples are strongest when she juxtaposes representations of social reading with evidence of the real-life circulation of texts between friends or lovers. For example, both Godwin and Wollstonecraft express doubts about the avid and contagious consumption of fiction. When Maria, heroine of Wollstonecraft's novel The Wrongs of Woman, falls in love with Henry Darnford because of her agreement with his marginal notes in the book she is reading, this seems like a cautionary tale. But Wollstonecraft and Godwin engaged less critically in their own shared or "sympathetic" reading. Likewise, Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," a poem alive with the joys of reading a good translation, appears here as product of a moment when Keats has just left the company of his friend Charles Clarke, with whom he's been up reading verse all night. This history is not new, but it figures constructively in McDowell's argument that human closeness might be routed through--as well as described on--the shared page.

As McDowell acknowledges, it is can be difficult to know whether imagined togetherness compensates for the writers' withdrawal from actual sociality. Reading Sympathy stresses that both real and imagined scenes of reading help Romantic authors investigate what an alignment of minds might mean. Accepting that fantasies and practices of reading break apart as often as they come together, McDowell makes a virtue of the authors' ambivalence, showing how they cemented and tested their social relations through texts.

McDowell is at her strongest as a critic of poetry. Perhaps poetry more readily reverberates across readers' minds, as when Keats goes home with Homer in his brain, or when citation enters his letters to Fanny as well as his dreams of her, or when Wollstonecraft and Godwin use lines of poetry to advance their own relationship. Moveable, memorable, quotable, poetry seems to exist in common more easily than the physical book or the literal act of reading. When the alignment of readers is orchestrated through a novel or play, it seems more likely to fail. Several examples assembled here, including the aforementioned one from Goethe, involve readers literally leaning in or reading over a shoulder. When the newlyweds in Godwin's Fleetwood read a play together, their initial harmony is broken up by Mary's willingness to drop reading for other, more compelling activity.

But when it succeeds, the venture of co-reading turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, to be sexy. McDowell discusses sex and reading together in the case of Keats and Brawne, and Wollstonecraft and Godwin; as well as fictional couples Casmir and Mary Fleetwood, and Eduard and Ottelie. In each instance, the relation seems to anticipate later novels, from D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover to Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, that describe lovemaking as a mutual reading of a partner's physical responses and a coincidence of two bodies' distinct pleasures. In these modern examples, complementarity and reciprocity are interwoven into the choreography of the bedroom in ways that, though more explicit, are strongly connected to the Romantic ideologies of sympathy that McDowell explores.

McDowell does not have much to say about how such positive fantasies of "sympathetic" alignment might figure as a counterpart to pedagogical, liturgical, or other modes of reading together. I'm thinking here of the obvious way that social reading was enacted for most Romantic readers through religious texts consumed together in or outside church, but also of schoolrooms and other scenes of adults reading to children. There's nothing in McDowell's chapter on Charles and Mary Lamb about reading to or alongside children, although their co-writing for children might have invited more investigation of that topic.

There are many scenes of more forced and pedagogical reading discussed, for instance, in Abigail Williams's The Social Life of Books that might have been compared to the ones of almost magical human understanding that McDowell is focused on. In his well-known essay "Uncritical Reading," Michael Warner explores religious and scholarly reading as odd practices, intricate and unnatural in their cultures of agreement about a text. In real life, getting someone to think along the same lines as you, as we know, does not necessarily entail care for the person reading. Sometimes it's coercive, invasive, or simply pedagogical.

This magical thinking belongs more to McDowell's authors than to McDowell herself. By her own account, McDowell is open to both the weakness and strengths of the trope of sympathetic reading. In the key case of Fleetwood, for instance, she highlights its failures. Nevertheless, her book does come down mostly in favor of the project. Fair enough: what Romantic readers believed about communicability may not always have led them to understand each other, but it set a high bar for that possibility. McDowell is in the strong company of critics like Pinch and Yousef, as well as many readers today, in understanding literature as a medium of connection between feeling minds. Perhaps because sympathy seems an effect that our own media landscape less readily produces, McDowell's defense of bonding over a book seems laudable. Reading together was something in which the Romantics were right to invest, a legacy that may still prove vital.

I like Reading Sympathy more for this being McDowell's bottom line. The future of long-form reading may well depend on more contemporary scenes of reading together. Whether mediated by platforms like BookTok or Goodreads, encouraged by education designed to bring reading back into the classroom, or promoted through shared literary citation--such as Taylor Swift's peppering her lyrics with Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickinson, and Fitzgerald--reading together clearly still has appeal that reading alone lacks. What McDowell offers in her own timely and richly exemplified book is the encouragement to see this as always having been the case.

Christina Lupton is Professor and Bewley Chair of English at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick.