It covers the lessons Ruth has learnt from each book, leading up to her 90 th year, and what they have meant to her, as well as the journey that led her through life, with and without Jane, and the events that shaped her beyond reading the books.Įach chapter is a different book – where Ruth reflects upon various aspects of her life, from childhood to adulthood and into her retirement and life at 90. She reflected on the first time she had read them, and the subsequent times, and what each reading taught her and made her think about the stories and the characters. For Ruth Wilson, it is Jane Austen that has made this impact on her and her life, and later in her life, she set out to re-read all six Austen novels: For me, Jackie French, Kate Forsyth, and Sulari Gentill. The ones we read again and again, or those whose books we buy without question. From the book we learnt to read with, to the first book we ever read independently, to that first novel we read – which for me was The Secret Garden, and to those authors that we keep coming back to. Published the year Ruth turns ninety, it is an inspirational account of the lessons learned from Jane Austen over nearly eight decades, as well as a timely reminder that it’s never too late to seize a second chance.Īs readers, the books we read throughout our lives have various impacts on us. The Jane Austen Remedy is a beautiful, life-affirming memoir of love, self-acceptance and the curative power of reading. And as she read, she began to reclaim her voice. Ruth had fostered a lifelong love of reading, and from the moment she first encountered Pride and Prejudice in the 1940s she had looked to Jane Austen’s heroines as her models for the sort of woman she wanted to become.Īs Ruth settled into her cottage, she resolved to re-read Austen’s six novels and rediscover the heroines who had inspired her to read between the lines of both the novels and her own life. Unable to dismiss her feelings of unexplainable sadness, she made the radical decision to retreat from her conventional life with her husband to a sunshine-yellow cottage in the Southern Highlands where she lived alone for the next decade. Synopsis: An uplifting and delightfully bookish memoir about an 89-year-old woman who reclaims her life by re-reading each of Jane Austen’s novels.Īs she approached the age of seventy, Ruth Wilson began to have recurring dreams about losing her voice.
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