Ruth Wilson > Quotes

“These conversations were exhilarating. They alerted me to the way shared reading could be a source of light in a dark world, forging friendships and creating like-minded communities.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“It strikes me that there is a core of communal humanity that sometimes wins out over prejudice, even in the worst of times.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“When I revisited Jane Austen’s fiction at my leisure half a century later, I turned to the memories they evoked to look more closely at how my thoughts and my emotions meshed. I discovered while making this account of my life that profit and loss were distributed throughout those years.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“Context is everything in fiction, as it is in life.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“I experienced Austen’s extraordinary powers of observation as a reimagining of the conventional love story, giving it a novelistic sparkle without filtering out the underlying shadows. Sun without shade is like day without night, I thought when I re-read the novel; it leaves us susceptible to a sort of psychic sunstroke in which we might lose our emotional bearings.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience – or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope. JANE AUSTEN, SENSE AND SENSIBILITY”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“Perhaps it was because Jane Austen and her companionate marriages seemed so far from my current reality that I came to neglect reading her novels for the time being. I also came, almost imperceptibly, to feel like a second-class citizen in the republic of marriage.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“It takes a certain sort of mindfulness in a reader, a willingness to accept that life, like art, is a blend of light and shade. And each is allowed its space in Austen’s fiction.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“The first chapter of Sense and Sensibility, like all Austen’s first chapters, shows us what is at stake when lives are unsettled. It is another example of Austen’s economy of means. She interweaves language, information and narrative to enrich the imaginative possibilities of the story that is about to unfold.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“And it is a telling example of how effectively Austen used her fiction to poke fun at ideas about the deferential relationship of women to men and the inferior role of women in society; to highlight the ways in which prevailing beliefs are dressed up in fine words and pretentious expressions.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“I think of Jane Austen as a writer whose novels never stop helping readers to grow up.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“Fiction shows us possibilities; in real life we make our own choices and learn to live with them, one way or another. So, in the life I live now, apart and together with the person whom I once mistook for my hero but who has, in the long run, turned out to be my best companion, there are friendships we value and people we love.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“If reading Pride and Prejudice was, for me, especially about learning to read, then re-reading Emma was more generally about acquiring a love of reading in the very act of reading.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“In a larger framework, reading Jane Austen’s novels would offer me a remedy for some of the doubts, uncertainties and disappointments that have mingled with the better parts of any life.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“My voice, which my elocution teacher had taught me to value as a musician would value a cherished instrument, had gone missing. I wanted it back.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“I had read Jane Austen and absorbed her ideas about companionate marriages, but when the crunch came, when children arrived and the male was the breadwinner, I succumbed as unconsciously as many others to the hidden persuaders lying in wait in every magazine: the advertisements, advice columns and even women’s reportage that gave gold stars to the woman who made her husband happy.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“And, I told her, I claim the right to put my soul in order.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“Women of my generation have been used to hearing this sort of patronising tone, from males in general, and from husbands in particular. Our views of the world and human relationships have been dismissed as too feminine, too idealistic, utterly unrealistic. The dramas of life with which we engage are ridiculed as melodramas.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“Curiosity has remained an enduringly present itch in my disposition. It ignited my urge to read and kept my passion burning with an intensity that drove me to re-read the fiction that captured my imagination. At times, curiosity is part of the remedy taking my mind off the pain of an experience and focusing it elsewhere, such as on trying to fathom the circumstances that surround it.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“When I discovered the possibilities of language as Jane Austen used it, both on the page and in my ears, a new door to fiction opened. Just as suddenly, another closed.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“In Emma Austen gives us a heroine who, in her customary and contrary way, resists the experience of reading.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“Austen’s novels have the peculiar attribute of being both popular with readers in search of entertainment and endlessly interesting for those who turn to fiction as a source of illumination about literature and the human condition.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“Austen is not asking for a choice; she is suggesting that the human imagination is bigger than either sense or sensibility. It embraces both and is improved and amplified as a result.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“There is something about stories that helps us to understand our lives. I already knew that. Whether myths, legends, fairy tales or fictions in their varied forms, fantastical stories attract human beings at the deepest level of feeling.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“So it has been helpful to me – and might be useful to readers – to recall the warning issued by the narrator of Jane Austen’s novel Emma: ‘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.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“Pride and Prejudice offers a superb template for the way heroines come to stand for something larger than themselves.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“if I were asked when reading became a source of nourishment and imaginative expansion, I would answer without hesitation that my reading life truly began with Pride and Prejudice.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“For some years I have recognised that the love of reading has been one of the unexpected blessings in my life. Reading has defined my life and become a habit that is woven seamlessly into the way I think, feel and imagine.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“Perhaps we don’t change just because we try; we change when we learn from people who love us how to love ourselves.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy

“Like multitudes of readers before and after me, I read it several times. I heard it in my head. This was language, prose language, used as I had never heard it: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
― Ruth Wilson, The Jane Austen Remedy