Participation, Beauty and Meaning

 Participation, Beauty and Meaning: An Account of My Research Journey*

 

‘Reading literature can help one regain one’s balance when the mind is distressed or out of equilibrium, as a result of illness, disability, or a traumatic event encountered in the course of an ordinary life’. 

 

I wrote this in my first ever ESREA paper in 2017 and it was the beginning of a journey that I made to find out whether there was any truth in the theory known as bibliotherapy. 

 

In my research since then I have posed the question of whether a reading of literature can help to heal minds and hearts? As a result, I have come across indications from my own life and from outside sources that this can be so. I have amassed a vast number of articles on the subject and published several essays, both in educational journals and as part of a group of bloggers. Most of the latter are writers of novels for children and adults. 

 

Since I joined this group, about five years ago, I have published a monthly blog which is widely accessible on the internet. Contributing authors can comment on each other’s work and do so in a generally supportive fashion. The subject of my essays is about life events, and how my reading of literature has influenced my perception of them. I have now published more than fifty blogs. Turning to one at random, I will elucidate.   

 

This blog is entitled ‘Only Connect’, a phrase uttered by Margaret Schlegel a character in E.M. Forster’s novel, Howards End. The context of the phrase suggests we should connect our inner and outer worlds, the head, and the heart, to find life’s meaning. The blog mentions how the actor, Samuel West, when appearing on the TV book programme, “Between the Covers” said that Howards End had 'knocked him sideways' when he was a teenager. It had had the same effect on me. One of my fellow bloggers, who I have never met in person, but who has often encouraged me to keep on writing, said that the blog had encouraged her to give Howards End another go.                                 

There is no shortage of articles I have discovered to aid my research. I came across one recently entitled, “Can Reading Make You Happier?” by Cedwin Dovey (2015), who is the author of several books, including novels and short story collections, and who describes attending a therapy session run by Ella Berthoud, joint author of The Novel Cure (2013) and the number of books she was prescribed. After a brief mention of these she says that she thinks reading fiction might be, ‘one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state where the distance between the self and the universe shrinks’. She includes a reference to Virginia Woolf’s comment that in reading the ego is eliminated enabling union with another mind, to support her idea.

 

Dovey discusses the history of bibliotherapy and how Berthaud and Elderkin produced their book and gives several other references with which I am familiar, such as the use of Jane Austen novels to help traumatised soldiers during World War 1. She goes on to mention the neuroscience of empathy, how when reading about an experience people display stimulation within the same neurological regions as when they go through that experience themselves. This recalled for me a time when, after miraculously surviving a hundred-foot fall in Scotland, I read on the return flight from Inverness a devastating account of the experience of a war correspondent, Hannah Storm, entitledThe Thin Line Between Everything and Nothing. This reading gave a feeling of closure to my still shocked mind.

I was aware of Berthaud and Elderkin’s work. I published an article online, “Reading Books is not just a pleasure: it helps our minds to heal” (2023), describing how I investigated bibliotherapy with a group of WEA students on a course called “Reading Can Enhance Our Lives”. On this course I introduced ideas from The Novel Cure, giving extracts from the book on ailments and what books might be appropriate to deal with them. The remedy for marital disharmony, for example was The Enchanted April (1922). The group, however, decided against this method, preferring to choose books themselves rather than having them prescribed. 

 

This course was very successful, and the group concluded that reading literature could be a factor in improving one’s mental health, ‘Reading novels and poetry can lift us out of our everyday experience and give us pleasure, mental stimulation, a sense of wellbeing and company,’ one had said at the start, and this was borne out by the course itself. At the end another said, ‘I find solace in books, quite easily becoming one of the characters as the pages turn… Family, friends are kind but in the modern changed world everyone is so busy…But there are highlights, being part of a group of people who enjoy and do discuss any type of culture, poetry in particular.’

 

A book which I read recently which related to my thinking was Why Women Read Fiction (2019) by Helen Taylor. For her research women talked to her about books they had read which had ‘comforted, challenged and transformed them’. Taylor had dedicated her book to ‘all those women who love fiction’. In one of my monthly blogs, which I had written to the author about, I said that, although my adult literature classes consisted mainly of women, there were one or two men, including myself, who found a degree of empathy with others in their reading of novels. She replied, agreeing and telling me of the difficulties she encountered when publishing a book during the pandemic.

 

This leads me to an account of an event that occurred after the death of a close family member, my wife’s aunt who I will call J. J was a great reader and traveller, and when we went to visit, I would often note her Faber copies of The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell on the bookshelf, a set of books I had always intended to read. After her funeral the family were asked if they would like anything from her house and I said that I would like that set of Faber books. Once I had read them the reading experience was so profound that I wrote the monthly blog about it. Here is a quotation:

 

‘I have been to different places, the descriptions of Alexandria are at times breath-taking; I have experienced an extended portrayal of a number of flawed relationships between men and women, something that always intrigues me as a reader and writer…I have communicated through a book with J, whom I liked and who has now gone from us to somewhere beyond the grave.’

 

This is something like the that ‘transcendental state’ envisaged by Cedwin Dovey in her article and along with other examples shows there is some truth in the theory that reading literature can come to our aid in times of distress.

                                                                               Peter Leyland, 16th January 2025

                                                           

 

*This article, a part-account of my research on bibliotherapy, was written for the ESREA 2025 Conference, "Participation. Beauty and Meaning" which i am unable to attend this year. In the piece I have referred to ideas for blogs that I have written for AuthorsElectric which I joined in May 2020.

ESREA: European Society for Research into the Education of Adults

 

 

References

 

Ella Berthaud and Susan Elderkin, The Novel Cure (2013)

 

Cedwin Dovey, “Can Reading Make You Happier?” (2015)

 

Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960)

 

E. M. Forster Howards End (1910)

 

Peter Leyland, “Reading books is not just a pleasure: it helps our minds to heal”, edited by Christian Jarrett (2023)

 

Peter Leyland, “Finding ‘The Alexandria Quartet’” in AuthorsElectric.blogspot.com, March 2022

 

Peter Leyland, “Only Connect” in AuthorsElectric.blogspot.com, December 2022

 

Peter Leyland, ‘Can Books Heal Us?’ Paper presented to the ESREA Conference on "Discourses We Live By" in Copenhagen, March 2017

 

Hannah Storm, The Thin Line Between Everything and Nothing (2021)

 

Helen Taylor, Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives (2019)

 

Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April (1922)

 

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925)