When Ruth Wilson left the city to live alone in a country cottage and to re-read the favourite books of her youth, she found a lifetime of memories and the peace she craved.
On a crisp winter day in 1992 I was sitting in my car, waiting impatiently at a traffic light; without warning the red circle started to spin crazily and I was hurtled into a vortex of incomprehension. I managed somehow to make my way home and climb the stairs to my flat, 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.
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 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.
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: theI 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.
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