This essay emerges out of conversations with early career English teachers about their experiences of teaching literature. During those conversations, they reflected on their own literary socialisation, including the reading they did at home and at school, as well as their tertiary education. They then considered what they had learnt as teachers from the way their students engage with literary texts in classroom settings. Their insights into the nature of a literary education provide a counterpoint to the ideological work of standards-based reforms, even though their professional practice has been unavoidably shaped by those reforms. They open up dimensions of a literary education that contemporary curriculum and policy discourses fail to recognise. Above all, they highlight the importance of affirming the primacy of a reader's personal response to a text as a condition for any meaningful conversation to take place in classrooms.