Authors Electric

Reading great and good literature, I thought, could help us regain our balance when the mind is distressed or out of equilibrium as a result of illnesses, disabilities or traumatic events encountered in the course of an ordinary life. I had read Montaigne, Dante, George Eliot, and a number of more modern authors like Jay Griffiths on the subject and I wanted to test the idea that our emotional health could benefit from reading and discussing novels and poetry in a learning situation and that this could directly affect our wellbeing. Mark Edmondson in  Why Read?   (2004) says that we can construct ourselves from novels, poems and plays and that like Proust, writers can get the reader to feel what they feel.  I set up a project with adult education students to test my idea. The course was free and took place over five weeks with students advising me how to plan it. One came up with this: 'Reading can enhance our life: reading poetry/novels can lift us out of our...