Reading enters the narrative through John McGahern’s research fellowship at Reading University. The post marks a practical turn from supply teaching in London toward a life in which writing could take precedence, though the evidence identifies the university appointment rather than describing the town itself.

The Research Fellowship

After his days as a supply teacher in London came to an end, McGahern was given a research fellowship at Reading University. It entailed a little teaching, but was designed to allow him to write. When he deferentially asked what he should teach, Professor of English Donald Gordon responded with a joke: after twenty-eight years of teaching, Gordon said, his students had understood none of it, and McGahern’s would understand none of his either; he could therefore teach them anything he liked. The exchange presents the fellowship’s limited teaching duties with comic lightness while making its real purpose plain.

Reading in McGahern’s Career

The appointment followed the unhappy end of McGahern’s marriage to Annikki Laaksi and his final days of supply teaching in London. Reading therefore marks a change in his working circumstances: teaching remained part of the post, but the fellowship was organized to give him room to write. The account does not claim that the appointment itself produced a particular book; it establishes the time for writing as part of the position’s design.

Narrative Significance

Reading’s place in the account is defined by this balance between employment and vocation. The brief teaching obligation is set against the fellowship’s explicit provision for writing, while Gordon’s anecdote turns the uncertainty of what to teach into a release from conventional academic expectations. In the following account, McGahern meets Madeline Green, travels with her to America for a visiting professorship, and later lives with her in Paris, where his first story collection, Nightlines, is published. Reading thus belongs to a sequence of changing professional circumstances in which writing becomes increasingly central, without the narrative presenting the fellowship as the sole cause of that development.