Dear FO° Reader,

If you’re reading this foreword, it’s probably because, while you’re in the habit of skipping a foreword when you see one in print, that habit has not yet transferred to text on a screen. We all do it, of course. If I’m picking up a book, I presumably want to hear from the author, and not someone else the editor has decided to inject at the beginning of the book. Still, we probably skip over forewords more or less without thinking. What Ranjani Iyer Mohanty has done is take this unthinking reflex into conscious consideration. She asks: “What do I really have to gain from reading a foreword?” As you will see, this question is materially equivalent to “What do I have to gain from reading a thoughtful, knowledgeable and invested fellow-reader?” And the answer to that is, quite evidently, “A great deal.”

I hesitate to call myself knowledgeable, but I am invested and, I hope, thoughtful. I will testify that Ranjani has convinced me to pay more attention not only to my reading but to the way I approach reading. As I write this on Sunday, Western culture’s traditional time to slow down and pay attention, I am reminded that, if I am sitting down to read a book at all, I ought not to be in a rush. Reading is leisure, and in a world dominated by the false binary of “work” and “entertainment,” we must fight to preserve that one scrap of time that is more serious than entertainment and more liberal than work. So, the next time I open a book, I will turn to page i and not just to page 1. I hope you will consider doing the same.

Anton Schauble

Reader, Editor and Occasional Foreword-Injector

Whenever I crack open a book — like Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women, which my daughter recently gave me as a birthday present — I turn to the foreword first.

By foreword, I do mean the foreword, not the introduction or the preface. I say this with a specious confidence because I only recently discovered that they’re not the same. While all are located before the main body of the book and offer contextual information to readers, they differ in terms of writer and purpose. An introduction is written by the author and, as the name suggests, introduces readers to the main topics in the book.  A preface is also written by the author and “tells readers how and why the book came into being.” Both can be found in works of fiction and non-fiction. A prologue is written by the author but from the perspective of a character in the story, often gives details of what happened before the main story began, and is therefore found only in works of fiction.

My slight annoyance with introductions and prefaces and prologues is that the authors have already had ample opportunity to say whatever they want in the main body of their work. So why should they be qualifying it with an add-on? Did they forget to say something? Do they just like the sound of their own words?

A foreword is different. It is written by someone other than the author of the book and therefore brings something new, different and hopefully insightful. The foreword is generally written by an authority either on the author or the topic, or both. Its purpose is to increase the credibility of the author, the relevance of the book and ultimately attract more readers. Oftentimes, the fame of the foreword writer itself is sufficient to improve book sales, regardless of the quality of the book or even the foreword. Today, any foreword written by Taylor Swift may well push an average book up the ranks into a The New York Times bestseller.

While a foreword is spatially placed before the main section of the book, it is always written after the main text — sometimes years or even centuries later. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was first published in the early 1800s, but M.K. Joseph wrote a foreword to it in the early 2000s. This distance gives the foreword a certain independence from the text.

A foreword is also different from a book review or critique in that the foreword is, as a rule, favorable. It is usually written by someone who loves or at least values the book. In some sense, reading a forward can serve a similar function to a book club meeting where you get to hear other people’s perspectives of a book. Only, with a foreword, you get to read a singular, coherent and favorable perspective, and you get to do so in an uninterrupted manner.

Moving forwards with forewords

Most people skip the foreword, and they have good reasons to do so. They may be excited to get directly to the story. They may not want someone else’s thoughts on or interpretations of the work, preferring to make up their own mind. They may not want any context before they start reading the work and indeed want to be surprised.

But I find forewords fascinating. Isabel Allende said, “Every life of a character is within a context.” Similarly, I think every life of a book is within a context. And how nice if some authority can explain that context to me, or at least their vision of the context. 

A foreword can act as a guide and tell us how to navigate the book. It can provide succinct summaries and insightful observations. It can explain certain complexities of the work or place it on a more philosophical or sociological plane. It can highlight the uncommon or link it to other similar works. It can explain why the subject matters. It can praise the author and the writing. It can help us relate to older works in several ways: by highlighting the work’s timeless concepts and emotions, by explaining that older context or by showing the work’s relevance to present times and current audiences. It can draw connections between both writers (the author of the book and the writer of the foreword) and thereby also hope to connect with the reader. Ultimately, a foreword should and can provide the context to make a book shine.

Forewords also have the advantage of catering to my highly efficient — ok, lazy — side. Sometimes, after reading a brilliant foreword, I feel so fulfilled, I don’t bother to read the rest of the book.

One amazing foreword

The virtue of some forewords lies in the famous personality of the foreword’s writer. However, in order for the foreword to be memorable, it needs to go beyond their fame to establish a visceral link. Oprah Winfrey’s 2015 foreword to Maya Angelou’s autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is not just the convergence of two famous personalities but a friend commenting on the writing of a friend. In Maya’s memoir of her childhood, Oprah finds herself: “I was that girl who loved to read. I was that girl raised by my Southern grandmother. I was that girl raped at nine, who muted the telling of it.” Oprah hopes that by highlighting this deep connection, the many people, particularly women, who feel an affinity with her will feel a similar affinity towards Maya.

The virtue of some forewords lies in the shared topical expertise of the foreword’s writer and the book’s author. Such is the case with influential diplomat Richard Holbrooke’s foreword to eminent historian Margaret Macmillan’s book Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. Holbrooke served as US Ambassador to Germany and the UN as well as US Assistant Secretary of State for two continents (Asia and Europe). His practical overview compliments Macmillan’s detailed academic work.

There are even some forewords in which the author and the foreword writer are closely related, and the virtue of these forewords lies in how intimately the foreword writer knows the author. Christopher Tolkien wrote the foreword for his father’s 50th anniversary edition of The Hobbit. More recently, Rebecca Walker wrote the foreword for her mother Alice Walker’s book We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For.

Then, there are forewords that do not rest on any special characteristic of the writer other than the strength of their own insightfulness. The virtue of the foreword lies in the foreword itself.

Andrew N. Wilson’s foreword to Excellent Women is one of these. Wilson is not a famous personality; he’s not an expert on the subject of “excellent women”; he’s not Pym’s son. But he has written an amazing foreword.

Wilson places Excellent Women in context in several ways. He explains the title from a sociological perspective. He describes the economic atmosphere in which the book was written in 1952. He compares and contrasts the book to famous works written a generation earlier, and finds that while “the conventional romantic novel ends with marriage,” Pym “very deftly turns comic tradition on its head.”

Then, Wilson wades into Pym’s personal life, her friends, her particular style of writing and how her life is reflected in this book. His subtle observations — like those of the author — speak volumes. He compares Pym to her close friend, the poet Phillip Larkin, and finds both similar in important aspects: “muted in their emotional response to life,” feeling that “life cannot hold out very exciting opportunities” and having “their eyes fixed firmly on the inevitability of age.”

Wilson concludes by saying that “any amount of social change does not alter the fact that the majority of human beings find life emotionally unfulfilling, and humdrum.” While this statement is unsettling in its nearness to a universal truth, it’s also strangely comforting. I find relief just in hearing someone voice it. Of still more comfort is Wilson’s observation that Barbara Pym’s books continue to speak to such people. 

Forewords and daughters

The foreword is not only another person’s perspective on the book, but it’s a person who is speaking directly to me, the reader. It seems personal, revealing not only of the book and its author but also of the writer of the foreword. And when the foreword writer says, “I feel this way about the book,” “The book has led me to feel this way,” “This is how I interpret the book,” or, “This is how this book connects to this universal phenomenon,” it gives me the license to do the same.

How wonderful it would be if I wrote a foreword to each of my most loved books and left them for my daughter when she comes to read those same books. Then, once my daughter finished reading the book, she could write a backword for me.

Backwords — more commonly called afterwords — are less usual than forewords but they do exist and appear at the end of the book. The writer of the afterword has the opportunity to write more freely, without fear of giving away any secrets or spoiling the plot because the reader has already read the book. They can even discuss alternative endings or offer a different perspective.

George Orwell’s iconic 1984 has a foreword by American novelist Thomas Pynchon and an afterword by social psychologist Erich Fromm. Some editions of To Kill a Mockingbird have a foreword by Oprah Winfrey and an afterword by writer-musician James McBride.

Mind you, my daughter has now far surpassed me in her reading and thinking, and so would no doubt be well able to write nuanced, insightful, humorous forewords for me. Then I would have the role of writing the afterwords for her. Forwards and backwards. Forewords and backwords. Mother and daughter. Daughter and mother.

After finishing Excellent Women, I called my daughter and told her how much I loved the book. It was the perfect birthday present. And of course, the foreword was the icing on the cake.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.