Blake Morrison reported in Britain’s “Guardian” newspaper that reading may bring lasting relief (“The reading cure,” The Guardian, January 5, 2008). Reporting an “incredible response” to Morrison’s story, the Reader Organisation “decided to run several one-day ‘bibliotherapy’ workshops.” Similar responses came from all over Britain.
Morrison studied a reading group near Liverpool that included an agoraphobic, a woman with bipolar disorder, a recent widow and someone from a homeless hostel. The language of “The Winter’s Tale” challenged them, but they persevered. People in fifty similar groups around Liverpool are reading challenging titles, too. Morrison found reading groups “in care homes, day centers, neurological rehab units, acute psychiatric wards” — in fact many therapeutic situations. “These reading groups,” he writes, “[are] an experiment in healing, an attempt to see whether reading can alleviate pain or mental distress.”
Morrison describes how the writer George Eliot recovered from grief by reading Dante with a friend, John Cross, who wrote, “The divine poet took us to a new world. It was a renovation of life.”
The philosopher John Stuart Mill experienced recovery after a “severe mental crisis,” reporting: “I seemed to have nothing left to live for.” But then Mill read a passage about the death of another man’s father. Mill described his own reaction: “A small ray of light broke in upon my gloom. I was moved to tears. From this moment my being grew lighter. The oppression that all feeling was dead within me was gone. I was no longer hopeless…”
“If books are to be therapeutic,” Morrison comments, “it’s because they take us to dark places rather than bright ones.”
During a long life, Eleanor of Aquitaine spent years in dark places — including many winters exiled in England. As an old woman dictating “Power of a Woman…” her mood is often dark when she recalls memories of crisis and abiding grief. As an author, I found writing Eleanor’s memoirs from those dark places cathartic. I would be interested to know if readers, living her trials, found personal relief in this book.