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.
As she approached the age of seventy, Ruth Wilson began to have recurring dreams about losing her voice. And as she grappled with feelings of unfathomable sadness, she made the radical decision to retreat from her conventional life with her husband to a small sunshine-yellow cottage in the Southern Highlands where she lived alone for the following ten years.
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.
Settling into her cottage in the country, she resolved to re-read Austen's six novels; to reflect on her life in relation to what she discovered in each of them. And as Ruth read between the lines of both the novels and her own life, she began to reclaim her voice.
The Jane Austen Remedy is a beautiful, life-affirming memoir of love, self-acceptance and the curative power of reading. 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.
