Whether it’s the rhythm of poetry or the catharsis of a novel, research shows that medicating with books really works. makes the case for prose over pills

Rachel Kelly

One evening, when Ellie Bate was five, she was rushed to hospital with kidney failure. Her mother, the biographer Paula Byrne, faced every parent’s worst nightmare when she was told her daughter might not survive the night.

‘My world was turned upside down,’ Paula recalls when we meet at Worcester College, University of Oxford. (Her husband is Sir Jonathan Bate, the college’s provost and a Shakespeare scholar.)

‘My thoughts were racing. I needed something to take my mind off what was happening while Ellie was in the operating theatre, but there was nothing but old copies of Hello! in the hospital waiting room. Luckily, I had a poem in my bag.’ The poem was All Shall be Well, the lyrical prayer of Julian of Norwich. Paula repeated the poem’s soothing cadences like a mantra all through the night: ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’

‘It very much sustained me,’ Paula says. ‘There was something important about holding on to the words when there were none. Someone else had given me the words I couldn’t find.’

Ellie survived the night, though has needed treatment ever since. At nine years old, she underwent a kidney transplant operation. She is now 16, six feet tall and a typical teenager.

‘Touch wood, she’s doing really well. But we’ve spent an awful lot of time in doctors’ waiting rooms with other frazzled parents and children. It has been very stressful. I have spent my time thinking about what I can do to help other parents in similar situations, and those finding life hard.’

Overwhelmed by caring for Ellie and working too hard, Paula herself eventually fell ill. ‘The