Dr Ruth Wilson had her first glimpse of Elizabeth and Darcy in the performances of Hollywood movie stars Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier in the 1940s film, Pride and Prejudice.
“I met Jane Austen in the picture theatre in the country town of Griffith with my parents,” said Dr Wilson. In her recently completed PhD in which Jane Austen’s novels are the exemplar for analysis, she proposes a reading model that allows for personal responses to characters. “Greer Garson is my Lizzie Bennett – she had such a merry way about her, such an archness without being coy. ”
Dr Wilson, who completed her PhD aged 88, has spent a lifetime reading and rereading Austen’s six novels: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey.
PhD thesis
Her PhD thesis, Milestones in a Reading Life: Jane Austen and Lessons in Reading, Learning and the Imagination (doc 450KB), is part personal reading memoir and part a re-imagined approach to teaching Austen’s fiction in schools, where the novels have appeared on reading lists for over a century.
Dr Wilson examines how reading Austen might be of value to student-readers, especially those preparing for adult life in the twenty-first century. She draws insights and techniques from memories of her own reading life and from the reading memoirs of other lifelong readers. Continue Reading I have loved to read Jane Austen’s novels ever since