REVIEW #5 RUTH WILSON: THE JANE AUSTEN REMEDY

The Jane Austen Remedy
by Ruth Wilson
Allen & Unwin, 2022
Review by Julie Wright

I admit, from the outset, that I have a love/hate relationship with autobiographies and memoirs. On the one hand, reading about other people’s lives is fascinating. Who cannot feel themselves in awe of the way these writers have risen to challenges and overcome the most horrific deprivations and yet instilled in us a sense of the dignity, the purpose and the hopefulness of being human and being able to achieve great things together? Remember J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, Anh Do’s The Happiest Refugee and Jimmy Barnes’s Working Class Boy and Working Class Man. The lessons in those four books alone are enough to transform our centre of gravity away from ourselves to the sea of human beings surrounding us. Through their experiences, we are carried a little further along the road to redeeming our soiled humanity. That’s a good thing, especially when it is undertaken with the loving kindness of these three men.

On the other hand, I mostly feel very uncomfortable about people portraying others with such confidence, painting their own picture of them that cannot be erased. I would not have the courage to write such a document. To expose family and friends to my version of the truth. To put into print only one version of events, their causes and their consequences. And yet, there are poems in which I have portrayed my relatives and others, albeit positively, and they have no say in that. In the case of my poems there is a sense in which they are serving a higher poetic purpose, rather than being presented as the definitive view of that person. Nevertheless, even when those portraits are sympathetic and drawn with love, I am conscious that it is still my perspective. When we want to be authentic, where do we draw the line. We do not exist in isolation. How do we depict those life lessons, without reference to real life?

Perhaps Ruth Wilson had similar reservations that led her to preface her memoir with the warning: ‘Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.’ With this quotation from Jane Austen’s Emma, the reader is completely disarmed and charmed by the author’s sincere attempt to recount a long life with as much veracity as she can muster, whilst humbly recognizing those most human of foibles, the tendency to reshape the past, to embellish it, to view it only from a personal perspective and make biased judgements about the part others played. My impression of The Jane Austen Remedy is that Wilson succeeded in laying bare her memories in a way that endears her to the reader for her willingness to make herself vulnerable and to truly understand, not only her past motives and choices, but also those of her complex and widely-flung web of friends and family.

This is not a book about events, causes and consequences. It is an exploration of the intricate relationships of lives that operate at an individual, relational and societal level in ways that demand so much of us, revealing our flaws and exposing our failures, yet also providing opportunities to develop strength and resilience and play our part in communal life. As Jane Austen understood so well, we are all born into a society and its beliefs and values are the basis of the social contract upon which we act, cooperatively, to enable it to function efficiently for the greater good of all. Most of this in unconsciously lived out. What Wilson does is attempt to make us aware of it. Her book is a map of the way the mind and heart respond to our circumstances. It is an attempt to plot a path of understanding through a life lived in the urgencies of the moment that do not leave us time to reflect deeply on the choices that take us in unexpected directions leading to unforeseen pains and pleasures. Wilson succeeded in showing that our literary heritage has many lessons to teach us, if we open ourselves up to those writers from the past who so astutely observed their society, and the common threads of humanity running through every age, irrespective of the social conventions and challenges of the times. Though we are hurtling, helter-skelter, towards the future, Wilson has reminded us that we need to learn from the past – even the fictional past! After all, ‘It is a Truth universally Acknowledged that a Book Can Change A Life.’