RUTH WILSON
The 89-year-old NSW writer says re-reading Jane Austen’s novels changed her life
How did Jane Austen help you reclaim your life? I think that her representation of life in her novels offered me a way of understanding a sudden feeling of regret and sadness. I was 60 and had been diagnosed with Meniere’s syndrome. The symptoms, extreme vertigo, nausea and a severe hearing disability, made it difficult, almost impossible, for me to pursue my activities in school classrooms. They also made me aware of a deep, perhaps preexisting, sense of loss. I turned to the novels because I remembered the sheer joy of earlier readings and I wanted to forget my predicament. They ushered me into a real world where could better understand my past and also imagine a different way of life in the future.
In what way are the themes of her work still relevant today? Intimate relationships and authentic friendships will always matter to human beings; as will the rules, regulations and protocols that govern social conduct.
What was the focus of your PHD awarded last year? I wanted to think about whether there was a way of learning to read Jane Austen’s novels at school that might help prepare students for the personal and ethical challenges of this century. I re-evaluated the relevance of Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park and Emma, which led me to recommend a more personal expressive way of reading at school.
Is there a book that made you love reading? Alice in Wonderland. What’s the best book you’ve read?
If you mean best-written, it is probably Austen’s Emma.
A book that had a pivotal impact on your life? Pride and Prejudice. First, because the language transformed my idea of what writing and reading could be, and how it could work to create more interesting worlds than I had ever read about previously. And second, because it shaped my view of how I wanted relationships and intimacy to work in my own life. I didn’t want to be Charlotte Lucas and manage a husband like so many women I knew. Re-reading that book at different stages of my life regularly re-contextualised it in the changing circumstances of each phase.
The book you couldn’t finish?
I have never managed to overcome my aversion to whaling sufficiently to finish Herbert Melville’s Moby Dick.
A book you wish you had read but haven’t got to? Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.
What book do you re-read? Austen aside, I have to thank Virginia Woolf for some of my best reads, and To the Lighthouse is my favourite.
What books are on your bedside table? I have almost finished rereading Hannah Kent’s novel Devotion, I am re-reading Pride and Prejudice in a 1996 edition and Mary Norris’s Between You and Me.
What are you writing next?
Well, my first goal is to complete and publish a paper that develops my ideas about learning to read novels like Jane Austen’s at school, where it might count, in a journal for English teachers.
The Jane Austen Remedy by Ruth Wilson, Allen & Unwin, $33