Examines the scene of reading in modernism, psychoanalysis and popular novels from the early twentieth century Challenges existing critical debates about modernism and reading Argues that the modernist portrait of reading reveals some of our culture's most powerful and enduring fantasies about the role of literature in psychic, social, and political life Analyses Virginia Woolf's portraits of reading in the context of wider modernist and psychoanalytic debates about the scene of reading Offers a striking analysis of the 'queen' (as Rebecca West described her) of 'bestsellers', Ethel M. Dell Draws on original archival research to present a compelling account of the writer, artist and psychoanalyst Marion Milner and her relationship to Virginia Woolf and modernism Makes an original intervention to reorient debates about modernism, critique and postcritique Reading Modernism's Readers: Virginia Woolf, Psychoanalysis and the Bestseller examines the scene of reading in modernist, psychoanalytic and popular writing from the early twentieth century. Focusing on the writing of Virginia Woolf, and reading her novels alongside writing by Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Ethel M. Dell, Melanie Klein, Marion Milner, and others, this book challenges our prevailing critical assumptions about modernist reading. Reading Modernism's Readers argues that the modernist scene of reading reveals some of our culture's most powerful and enduring fantasies about the role of literature in psychic, social and political life. Reading modernism alongside psychoanalysis and the bestseller, this book aims not only to intervene in debates about modernism, but also to address its legacies in contemporary literature, and in the context of increasingly urgent questions about how--and why--we read today.