Ruth’s Jane Austen Remedy

In the late 1940s, when she was 16, Ruth Wilson first fell in love with Jane Austen in a Griffith cinema, watching Greer Garson’s Elizabeth Bennet judge, reject, then fall in love with Mr Darcy. At school, she told her English teacher and was given a copy of Pride and Prejudice. This sparked her lifelong love affair with Austen’s novels. She has revisited them numerous times over the decades.

Much later, when in her late eighties, Ruth embarked on an academic journey, enrolling in a PhD program at the University of Sydney, culminating in her thesis, ‘Milestones in a Reading Life: Jane Austen and Lessons in Reading, Learning and the Imagination’. Ruth shared her study journey in a presentation to the Jane Austen Society of Australia in 2022.

Ruth encapsulated her experiences and reflections in her memoir, The Jane Austen Remedy. The book intertwines her personal narrative with analyses of Austen’s novels, illustrating how literature can serve as a catalyst for self-examination and transformation. Her memoir has been described as an uplifting account of love, self-acceptance, and the curative power of reading.

“Being at the University was a continuation of an intellectual awakening that had started with reading books in high school,” said Dr Ruth Wilson. The reading method that Ruth practised in her thesis led to an invitation to write a reading memoir in which Austen’s fiction is central to a reading life. Her book The Jane Austen Remedy was the magnificent result.

Austen’s novels taught her many things – about herself and about other people, and she learned different lessons from each of the six.

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