A more assiduous reader these ancient shelves had not seen since the days of George III

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett.  A delightful and subtly clever humorous piece.  The basis of the story is the supposition of what would happen if late in life Queen Elizabeth had become an enthusiastic reader.  Charming.

In the absence of Norman her reading, though it did not falter, did change direction. While she still ordered books from the London Library and from booksellers, with Norman gone it was no longer their secret. Now she had to ask the lady-in-waiting, who spoke to the comptroller and then drew the petty cash. It was a wearisome process, which she would occasionally circumvent by asking one of the more peripheral grandchildren to get her books. They were happy to oblige and pleased to be taken notice of at all, the public scarcely knowing they existed. But more and more now the Queen began to take books out of her own libraries, particularly the one at Windsor where, though the choice of modern books "was not unlimited, the shelves were stacked with many editions of the classic texts, some of them, of course, autographed - Balzac, Turgenev, Fielding, Hardy — books which once she would have thought beyond her but which now she sailed through, pencil always in hand — and in the process, incidentally, becoming reconciled even to Henry James, whose divagations she now took in her stride: 'After all', as she wrote in her notebook, 'novels are not necessarily written as the crow flies.' Seeing her sitting in the window to catch the last of the light, the librarian thought that a more assiduous reader these ancient shelves had not seen since the days of George III.