It occurred to me that my greatest love outside family and work had always been a love of reading fiction; of all the novels I had read, Jane Austen’s were my benchmark for pleasure as her heroines had been models for the sort of woman I wanted to become. A nostalgia for those books swept over me. So I decided to think of recovery as a rehabilitation of my reading life, and to start by revisiting the six novels. I wanted to re-read those passages that had made Austen’s fiction important to me: the bons mots, the well-worn quotations and the lively conversations. I didn’t know it then, but I was embarking on an untested approach to reading. I was making Austen’s novels a starting point for exploring the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of my own life, framed and illuminated by her fictional universe.
On our daily dog walk the other day, I explained to my horrified sister-in-law what I had learned about The Jane Austen Remedy from its Introduction: When Ruth Wilson turned sixty, she started developing vertigo (diagnosed as Meniere’s syndrome, Wilson would think of it as more a metaphysical disease of the soul), and when she turned seventy, she realised she was still not well, “In a revelatory surge, I had stumbled into a moment of truth: I was out of love with the world and I was not happy.” With a family legacy that allowed her to buy a cottage in Australia’s Southern Highlands — and with no small dose of inspiration from writers like Virginia Woolf and Germaine Greer — Wilson decided to leave her “bewildered” husband of over fifty years and live in her cottage, alone: “It was, I thought, time to take my turn; a last chance to examine what had become of a girl’s once-upon-a-time great expectations of life.” I knew from the Introduction that Wilson had seemingly known domestic happiness with her husband and four children, she had had a fulfilling career and a life of travel, continuing education, and lively interactions with a large circle of friends, but at seventy she felt it had not been enough (she had always felt the patriarchal power imbalance in her marriage and wanted to finally have the last word on matters that concerned her) and she determined to do something about it. And in this initial conversation with my sister-in-law, we couldn’t decide if this was bravery or madness: when is selfishness the ultimate act of kindness towards oneself, and when is it an antisocial assault on the world around you? Happily, this is just the Introduction, and throughout the rest of her memoir, Wilson relates the story of a fascinating life — tying events to lessons learned from a lifetime of reading, but especially to the rereading of the novels of Jane Austen; her passion project for the next decade — and she certainly makes the case that even at seventy it’s not too late to create the life one has always wanted (Wilson eventually turned elements of her Austen reading project into a doctorate dissertation at eighty-eight and the publication of this memoir has coincided with her ninetieth year). The biographical bits were engrossing, the social commentary was wise, and the intertextual connections were exactly to my taste. The writing, the thinking and lived experience behind the writing, and the connection to the greater human project are all of the highest level: I can’t give fewer than five congratulatory stars for a life well-lived and well-told. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
In real life we read both for pleasure and beyond pleasure. We read to pick up clues that help us to navigate our lives and relationships, and expand our understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. And on re-reading Northanger Abbey as I undertook my reading cure, I became convinced that this novel, like the others that Austen produced, was doing that for me, stimulating me to ruminate on fiction with a renewed awareness that what had been missed in the past might now be a guiding light for the future.
Over the course of The Jane Austen Remedy, there are chapters devoted to each of Austen’s six novels, with Wilson discussing the plots, the universal lessons that might be learned from each, and how she relates the various storylines and heroines to her own life (while one doesn’t need to have read the novels to understand Wilson’s discussion of them — I haven’t read them all — I suppose this would be of ultimate interest to the diehard Austen fan). Wilson also shares what other novelists and biographers have written about Austen, but ultimately, this is Wilson’s memoir; the story of how she found herself living with the consequences of “being born on the wrong side of feminist history”, and I was fascinated by the whole thing. The heart of this work — and what sounds like the heart of Wilson’s career — might be found in the following:
Elie Wiesel’s novel Night is one of the earliest and most powerful testimonies to the enormous void in moral awareness in the absence of empathy. The Nobel prize-winning author reflected on why the heirs of Kant and Goethe, Germans who were among the best-educated people on earth, were not inhibited by their education from behaving as they did when they set out to exterminate whole human populations — not just Jews, but Romani, homosexuals, and people with intellectual or physical disabilities and mental illness. According to Wiesel, it was made possible by the fact that education — including education constructed around great literature — took the wrong direction. By emphasising theory and concepts and abstractions rather than values and consciousness and conscience, it subverted its own intentions. He was implying, I believe, that the factors contributing to the development of an empathetic consciousness were discouraged by the educational approach.
Wilson's background is as an educator, and not only did she lead a celebrated project on recording the stories of Holocaust survivors, but the emphasis on empathy over theory in her approach to education eventually led to a dissertation that “positions Jane Austen in the field of empathy”. (So while reading the six Austen novels and using their storylines to tell her own life story may seem slightly gimmicky, Wilson actually did re-read those novels in her eighth decade and became a published Austen expert; this is not so much gimmicky as a well-crafted exemplar of Wilson’s theories on empathy; I absolutely came around to seeing life through her eyes and recognise the bravery that it took to reclaim her life.)
That’s the thing about reading: our brains hold an archive of everything we have ever read. I have noticed that, in some mysterious way, reading memories surface from nowhere to connect with a random present moment. From Austen, Elizabeth, the Bennet family and marriage I wander into Margaret Drabble’s and Penelope Mortimer’s territory; I tune into remembered resonances with Graham Swift and Mothering Sunday, wander on to comparisons with Henry James and Isabel Archer, and then reflect on my own life and my own memories, pleasant and otherwise. That’s the rather messy business that we readers engage in as we look for coherence in what we are reading. It is also how many of us come to terms with our own lives, making some sort of sense of our life stories as we read.
