A previous article has something to say about the pain of being interrupted while reading. It contains an extract from Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Princess that describes very well how annoying such intrusions can be.
Being interrupted while immersed in a book is bad enough; being discouraged or even prevented from reading it in the first place is even worse!
Just as some of the people who interrupt readers are well intentioned, so are some of the people who try to discourage others from reading. As this further extract from A Little Princess shows, they may be trying to enhance the reader's life:
"I am not in the least anxious about her education," Captain Crewe said, with his gay laugh, as he held Sara's hand and patted it. "The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books—great, big, fat ones—French and German as well as English—history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. Drag her away from her books when she reads too much. Make her ride her pony in the Row or go out and buy a new doll. She ought to play more with dolls."
Captain Crewe buys a doll for his daughter Sara:
The head of the girls' school in Charlotte Brontë's Villette is concerned about the detrimental effect that the amount of reading Lucy Snowe does might have on her health:
“Madame Beck...often and solemnly used to warn me not to study too much, lest “the blood should all go to my head.”"
