Ruth Wilson’s Life of Passion, Perseverance, and an Austen Remedy

Captivated by Austen

In the late 1940s, a 16-year-old girl found herself captivated by Jane Austen’s world while watching Greer Garson’s portrayal of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice at a Griffith cinema. Elizabeth’s evolution from scepticism to love for Mr Darcy ignited a lifelong affection for Austen’s novels. Her English teacher, upon hearing of her new-found love for Austen, directed her to a library copy of Pride and Prejudice, and thus began a love affair that would last a lifetime.

Shortly after, when Ruth first entered the University of Sydney to study for a Bachelor of Arts (English and Education), she was a self-doubting, lonely girl from the country. She loved her literature studies and was a founding member of the theatre society, Sydney University Players. She played Lady Macbeth in a Sydney University Dramatic Society production in the Great Hall and other roles in the Footbridge and Wallace Theatres.

She met her husband, David, in the university quadrangle. He was studying for a degree in dentistry and was one year older. “We both revelled in our time at the University,” Ruth said. They married when she was 21 and raised a family in Sydney.

Ruth’s serious writing has had a long gestation period. She served her apprenticeship with the lit-crit essays she wrote for her BA, a first degree conferred at age 20; and again, in what she calls a ‘mildly rigorous’ thesis for an MA at the age of 47, in which she wrapped the mature novels of Charles Dickens in the ideas of psychologist Erich Fromm about how learning to love makes us become better people.

Throughout her professional life, Ruth wrote educational resource books and project reports. Still, serious writing didn’t come until she undertook her PhD at the age of 85. Here she finally mastered the art of blending observation, speculation, and evidence with interrogation, reflection, and meditation. She says, “That was the beginning, and it led to writing a memoir in which, at last, I found a voice that sounds like the way I feel, think, and imagine.”

Ruth has always loved the way people tell their own stories. Perhaps that is why she has always been drawn to life writing and memoirs. “They taught me that people’s life stories are worth telling, and that readers often make inspired writers of their own stories,” she recalls. “So I adopted the genre, tried to emulate the carefully constructed and finely crafted sentences of 18th and 19th century essayists, and exulted in the creative spirit that flowed into releasing my memories.”

A Journey Back to Austen

In this edited extract from The Jane Austen Remedy, Ruth recalls how she reached a turning point in her life:

On a crisp winter day in 1992 I was sitting in my car, waiting impatiently at a red traffic light; without warning that red circle started to spin crazily and I was hurtled into a vortex of incomprehension. I managed somehow to make my way home, where I lay in a dark room for 24 hours. The following day my condition was diagnosed as Meniere’s syndrome; the symptoms include hearing loss, nausea and vertigo.

The experience was disconcerting and left me shaken; but more disconcerting still was my experience a few weeks later, at a surprise party that had been arranged for my birthday. I entered a room to find 60 people covering their faces with shining silver masks.

I realised that behind the masks there were many good friends and loving members of my family, but as they clapped and cheered I was overcome by a strange antipathy. I greeted guests and made conversation but I was someplace else. I had stumbled into a moment of truth: I was out of love with the world and I was not happy. I felt utterly lost.

But how to explain it? I had lost no one. I had reached the age of 60 with my family intact and my days filled with projects that interested me. It might seem that my life, like that of Jane Austen’s heroine Emma, united some of the best blessings of existence. And yet, I was experiencing something more devastating than the distress and vexation that Emma encounters on her way to self-knowledge. I felt utterly lost. I sought professional help and was comforted by the assurance that Meniere’s syndrome sometimes mimics depression. Medication was prescribed, I gave up eating salt, and I resumed my busy routine.

On the surface, life continued to be ordinary. When a family legacy came my way, I bought a small cottage in the Southern Highlands, a two-hour drive from Sydney. I reminded myself that, even as a child, I had always enjoyed my own company.

My cottage came to represent a piece of real estate in which my state of mind might be remedied. It stood at the top end of a steep and winding road, in a town slightly larger than Meryton, where the Bennet family lived, and considerably larger than Emma’s Hartfield. I started to spend my weekends there, getting to know a community like the one Austen described to her niece Fanny as “just the thing” to be of interest to a fiction writer – or, in my case, a fiction reader. I was hoping for a remedy: a panacea for a malaise I could no longer dismiss.

I had thought I was doing well enough, but as I was arranging the photographs that recorded a gathering on my 70th birthday, I noticed that I was not smiling in any of them.

I wondered why, for someone so privileged, I looked miserable. Was I becoming a misanthrope? I asked myself. The expression on my face seemed to embody Elizabeth Bennet’s observation to her sister Jane: “There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well … The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it.”

I decided to stake a claim to my space, to make my cottage in the Southern Highlands into my permanent home, to spend my time trying to understand my malaise, to find a happier way of being.

After 50 years of marriage, it was a difficult, complicated and emotionally painful decision. My husband was, I think, bewildered. I had never discovered a way to convey to him the intensity of my own feelings. I longed to make decisions without being challenged, to be the one who sometimes had the last word, especially in matters that were chiefly my personal concern.

I was tired, I realised; I was especially tired of being surrounded by people whose values I could no longer pretend to share. I had no idea how it would turn out for any of us as a family, but 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.

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. A nostalgia for those books swept over me. I wanted to re-read those passages that had made Austen’s fiction important to me: the bon mots, the well-worn quotations and the lively conversations.

Through a newly built elevated reading room with vast windows, I looked out of my cottage on a maple grove and up a thickly wooded hill. Like Emma, I rejoiced in the “exquisite sight, smell, sensation of nature, tranquil, warm, and brilliant after a storm”; the difference was that Emma’s storm was past, and mine was still raging inside me.

It turned out that I would live in the cottage that I called Lantern Hill, after a favourite childhood book, for almost 10 years, during which I discovered a small piece of canvas in regional Australia just as the one that served Austen as she sketched her typically English comedies of manners. I didn’t guess that, by re-reading Austen’s fiction at the age of 70, I would be consoled in ways that would lead me to the best years of my life.

I lived alone but was less lonely than I had been earlier. People made judgments; I didn’t heed them. Some asked questions; I didn’t answer them. Others – mainly women – understood, because they, too, had experienced the unbearable loneliness of marriage. The only friends I retained were people I cared for and about.

I filled my days with reading, sometimes alone, sometimes in the excellent company of other Austen readers. These were different ways of reading, and each had its rewards. My three daughters remained, as always, the closest and most beloved friends of all, my latter-day heroines. During this period, they taught me as much as they had, I hoped, learnt from me.

I didn’t guess that, by re-reading Austen’s fiction at the age of 70, I would be consoled in ways that would lead me to the best years of my life.

(Edited extract from The Jane Austen Remedy by Ruth Wilson)